Milk and Honey

Reflections

2010-06-29T05:53:00.001-04:00

I write this from Egypt, two days after the goodbyes. I’m not far from Israel, just 30 minutes down the Sinai coast, at a little beach called Paradise Sweir (or Paradise Swire, depending on which sign you’re looking at – we still aren’t sure what it means). We meant to get farther down the coast, but the taxi driver insisted that we first check this place out, surely out of the goodness of his own heart and not because he has a deal worked out with the owner. Turns out it’s really nice: the tiny shacks have an outlet, lighting, and a wicked view of the Gulf of Aqaba and Saudi Arabia 20 kilometres across the water, and to top it off lodging is 5 Egyptian pounds a night (5 pounds to one US Dollar). They make their money off of the food, but even this is perfectly reasonable – last night for instance we all sat down banquet style to a giant platter of makluba (rice stewed with vegetables, beans, and meat) for 35 pounds each. No one walked away from that meal hungry. I’m here with 8 people from the institute and my good friend Noah, who’s in the region for 3 months. Noah remarked this morning, after waking up with the sun, having a big breakfast of falafel, foul, salad, and pita, and chatting by the sea for a few hours, that this is the kind of place you could lose yourself at for months if you weren’t careful – good food, cheap everything, people filtering through from all over the world, beautiful scenery. But Monday morning he’ll head for the epitome of bustle that is Cairo, and I will head back to Israel for one last night before catching a plane back to Toronto at noon on Tuesday. This few days is a welcome period of unwinding after the end of the semester.

The Arava Institute portion of this masters degree is over – no more kibbutz, no more PELS, no more interdisciplinary environmental classes, no more intentional peace-building community. Granted, the tiny desert studies academic institution I’ll find myself at next year is still a couple steps removed from the world of work and commerce (what some people call the “real world”), but I may never again find myself involved so intensely in such a tight-knit community hell bent on group discovery, discussion, and social change. This past year has been almost like a year-long summer camp for adults, only with classes, exams, and papers. Everyone should be so lucky to have this kind of experience at least once in their life – I can see why so many people have a hard time leaving, and keep coming back in whatever capacity they can. I feel like this is the kind of blog post that calls for a summing up, a deep analysis of the experience to digest the entirety of a year at the Machon into a readymade manifesto, story, metaphor, poem, song…to make a map of the experience at the proper scale and hold it in my hands so that I can return to it and find my way around again. I’ll do what I can.

Taking the Machon’s surroundings as an arbitrary starting point, it is notable that this program finds itself in the middle of the Arava Valley, one of the driest places on earth, on a desert kibbutz. The placement of the kibbutz has many explanations, depending on your perspective. On the one hand it is a triumph of ruach (spirit) that a group of bright-eyed nineteen-year-old kids decided they were going to plant themselves into the hot desert sands and build a new garden of eden – it is indicative of the particular Zionist spirit that they saw only a bright world ahead, that they could use their own hands, their own sprit, their own resources and creativity to coerce the desert into a state of blooming paradise. What a feat of imagination! And if you look at the product of it today, this particular kibbutz remains socialized, is one of the most diverse and thriving (though this is a relative term) kibbutzim in the area. Concessions have been made, growing melons and onions was abandoned, Thai workers have been hired, but new directions have also been struck with the algae factory and the new Arava Power Company. And if you look at Ketura from above, you see a carpet of green in the midst of a blanket of sand.

On another hand, this wasn’t just a few kids striking out on their own into the desert on their own initiative– for generations planning policy in Israel has been strategic first and environmental, social, and economic second. The Zionist spirit thus has another blade, and that is an expansionist one, neurotically ethnocentric and protective of the Jewish nature of the state, militant and based on a self-conscious effort to revolutionize the nature of the Jew from bookish and weak to a very socialist version of the peasant prodigy – strong, self-sufficient, ideologically driven by allegiance to the Jewish collective. Nowadays we think of Israel as almost an extension of American Foreign policy –Americans looking back might be shocked and uncomfortable with how much it looked like socialism in theory and practice in the early days. The pain of discrimination and violent anti-Semitism left its mark on this new mentality – no one could convince one of these early settlers that they would be safe again unless they were self-governing, ethnically pure, and outwardly strong, and you’d have even less chance of it with the Jews who fled during and after World War II. The rallying cry of “a land without a people for a people without a land” echoed throughout the Jewish world, and the mentality of those “New Jews” was reflective of this – the vast Arab population majority and the 500 Arab villages then in Turkish then British Palestine proper were a temporary impediment to the reclamation of the land as a Jewish State, at best potential brothers and partners in the future Jewish State, at worst animals to be cleared out of the way in its establishment by a variety of means. The “clear, open desert” that those 19 year old kids found themselves in had been formerly the home of semi-nomadic Bedouin who happened to be in the way of this Zionist dream, and who now find themselves in a position of “sign all your historic land claims away for an foreign sedentary lifestyle or live in a pocket of third world in the midst of a newly OECD country”. Still wrapped around Ketura are the remnants of the old quadruple layer barbed-wire fence, a reminder that these settlements filled the Zionist dream in two ways – they made the desert bloom and they held the enemy at bay, forming the skin of the new flourishing ethnocracy.

Looking at the desert on another plane of thought, another dialectic of no less importance emerges, that between the urge toward conquest and the urge toward awe. In the first semester, for the environmental anthropology class, our assignment was to generate an ethnography of kibbutz members about their relationship to the environment, and I personally was struck by how much living in the desert structures the thought of those who live here, even when they’ve been removed from the search for basic needs like the constant search for fresh water and the need to beat the heat during the hottest months (thanks to AC). One woman said that she feels the presence of the desert surrounding her all the time, and finds the openness soul-freeing. Others find it too open, the barrenness oppressive. For some people, the desert is a challenge to which we must rise, to others it is a force before which we must humble ourselves. Both of these stances have their time and place, but often one wonders why settle the desert at all? For all of our conquering, the kibbutzim here are stuck in a ridiculous situation – their economies are based around dairy and dates. The dates can live in salty water, which is great because that is what comes out of the fossil aquifer (meaning it doesn’t recharge. When it’s gone, it’s gone), but they need 1000 litres of it per tree per day! If the dates seem unsustainable, the cows just seem like lunacy – they need water all day, especially in the summer, to cool down, and they’re certainly not grazing on any lush pastures within 500 kilometres of Ketura. Though I said the kibbutzim are successful, they’re still financially on a shoestring, and need to keep mining water to survive. No one really knows how much is left in the aquifer – the battle against the limitations of the desert is sure to end in failure if carried out in the same way as it is today. But a change in tactics is taking place, one that seems to respect the desert for what it is rather than trying to make it what it is not – the Arava Power Company is set to open up heaps of photovoltaic operations beginning in the next couple years, and the vision for the region is to shift to this sort of economy.

I guess what I’m trying to get at is that the most important lesson I’ve taken away from the Machon is that we always live at the intersection of so many dialectics, dynamic contradictions and paradoxes that structure the limitations of our thoughts and actions. Noah is fond these days of quoting Saul Bellow, “where there is no paradox there is no life.” Left wing versus right wing, security versus freedom, intuition versus rationality, social versus natural, local versus global, thought versus action – find yourself clinging entirely to one of these poles and you’ll find that you are entirely stuck, with no chance of progressing. The world is always changing, faster every day, and thus being stuck puts you in quite an unfavourable position. The theme of this year’s Children’s Peace Theatre show in Toronto, which I will be helping to organize, is “the spaces in between”. Caught in the sticky web threaded through these dialectics is our situation in this world, and there’s no escaping it. We are brothers and sisters in our feeling of thrownness – we wake up into the world as if from a dream of a perfect garden and enter a stranger one where there’s no certainty and no hard and fast rules or answers.

At the Machon we wake up from the strange dream of our lives and enter into an even stranger one still, where enemies become friends and whatever you thought you knew turns out to be, not wrong per se, but only a few threads in a tapestry so large that trying to step back from it becomes dizzying. All of this sounds very abstract, and when it hits you, as it does at least once daily, the amazing nature of set-up we’ve got at the Machon, it can seem all too easy – the cultural exchange is smooth, the laughter and affection are abundant, the community seems strong. But behind each person is a tangle of personal history, cultural history, family ties and loyalties to good friends, a formal education, an informal education, a hundred mentors and pieces of advice and wisdom clung to, a thousand formative experiences, joys, and sorrows. Still we must all sink our roots somewhere, and form some identity out of this tangle. When we get to the Arava desert for the AIES program the sands prove too shifting for our formerly comfortable roots and we confusion sets in. It is a telling sign of the shock of this upheaval that one of the most common suggestions in the end of semester student program evaluation was a staff psychologist.

The final days were rushed – final papers kept people occupied, or at least on edge, while cleaning, packing, and the impending goodbye made writing those papers feel even worse - with so much still do say and do, so much still to learn from one another, too many stories still untold, who cares about a grade? But no matter how free we all were, a three day intensive listening circle would only have proved the endless nature of the journey we all have started here. I may find myself in fertile soil again, but my roots will always be restless and searching, never again complacent. Already the calls of longing across the internet have begun, and we have instituted a monthly picnic somewhere accessible to everyone. And though we may lose touch with many of the people over the years, we know that somewhere out there are 45 people who have shared this experience, and who were at one time as close as family.

Up and Down, Side to Side (Act II)

2010-06-13T09:37:00.007-04:00

This past weekend [note, this is now 3 weekends ago, exams and papers really get in the way!] was a bit of a whirlwind, and a testament to just how small this region really is. At 1:00 pm on Friday I hopped on the Egged bus for the always beautiful 3.5 hour trip up to Jerusalem, through cracked and desolate desert speckled with improbable patches of green wrenched from the scorched earth by sucking water from aquifers or pumping it hundreds of kilometres. Much of the trip is spent with the Dead Sea and the mountains of Jordan to the right, and then the turn at Jericho brings you to the Judean hills, spotted with the shanty-dwellings and goat-herds of unrecognized Bedouin, and, not unrelated, little vegetation. First stop after the central bus station was an hour saunter through the decelerating activity of west Jerusalem, with shops closing or closed for the coming Shabbat. The destination was Nava Tehila, a monthly Kabbalat Shabbat service consisting of an inner circle of acoustic instruments, and concentric circles of singing and dancing – not your grandfather’s service! As an existentialist by philosophical leaning, I go to this service for the immense energy and power that the people there draw out of themselves – the room is buzzing and electrified, something I generally find lacking from the solemn, quiet (read: boring) nature of most services I’ve attended. If I’m going to spend an hour exalting a deity I don’t believe in, it had better come with some good music to allow me to transcend the absurdity of this act!

After an hour at Nava Tehila, the next stop was a cab to east Jerusalem, just on the other side of the Old City, where the Arab buses leave to go all over the West Bank. I hopped on the Ramallah bus with my friend Aya from the Machon, and, practicing my fledgling Arabic, ordered two tickets (“Shu adeish? Ithnayn,” say I. “thirteen,” says the driver in return). The Ramallah bus heads through east Jerusalem to the north and east, and at a certain point traces the separation wall to the nearest checkpoint. You can see as you drive along this barrier how neighborhoods, families, villages, economies have simply been wrenched apart by the wall. "See that desolate junction?" Aya says, "That used to be one of the busiest markets around. Now there's a slight...barrier to trade." Some people have been cut off from their families, and where they used to be able to walk down the street to say hi, now need a permit to get through the wall. To put this into perspective for thos of you who know Toronto, my parents live on Wembley road just east of the Allen expressway and just north of Eglinton, and my Sister has been living just half a block west of the Allen, and half a block south of Eglinton. Now, imagine a political wall has been erected along the route of the Allen, all the way down to the water and all the way up to Barrie, with the nearest checkpoint through it up at Sheppard. Now a five minute walk is at least a half hour drive, potentially hours depending on the wait at the checkpoint, and it could be never, depending on your ability to get a permit to travel through the checkpoint in the first place. Imagine the feeling of knowing that your grandchild is what used to be a five minute walk away, and now is a once-a-year visit, perhaps never. These are my thoughts as we drive towards Ramallah, the wall rising up 10 meters on our right.

Getting into the West Bank isn’t really a problem, no one checks you; it’s getting out that’s the trickier part, but that’s for later. Once into Ramallah, we tore off the bus and just managed to flag down a cab as it was accelerating into a green light, then off to a concert at the Ramallah Cultural Palace. The Cultural Palace is a gorgeous venue, fairly new, with a high ceiling and decent acoustics, and the concert itself was one-of-a-kind: the front man was a jovial oud player and singer, to his right was a q’noun, and to his left two percussionists – a fairly typical Arabic set-up. To the q’noun player’s right though, things started to get interesting: first a double bass and a cello, then…a saxophone. Followed by an accordion and a piano. Needless to say, the music was really unique, and quite good!

After saying hi to some people after the show (The Rammallah arts and culture scene is reminiscent of most smaller cities – everyone knows everyone and attends each other’s shows), we headed off to the house of a friend of Aya’s named MisbaH. Walking through the door, we were greeted by a table full of the best vegetarian food I’ve had since I got to this region. Cooking, however, is not MisbaH’s only talent, and in the past decade or so he has become a central player in the Ramallah underground art scene, promoting the use of art as a means of resistance. He looks every bit the underground artist with a mane of shaggy dark hair, a slight and agile build, a quiet, kind demeanor and dark, curious eyes. He’s so good at what he does, in fact, that his talent recently threw him into the biggest decision-making crisis of his life. You see, MisbaH has been living in Ramallah for the past decade (literally, in Ramallah. He has not left this city in ten years due to not being able to get a permit to do so), but he is originally from Gaza, and it says so on his ID. Recently, he got accepted by on long shot to a major art conference in Berlin, and also to a master’s program in Sweden (he has a BA in mathematics). Israel has been slowly tightening restrictions on the freedom of movement of Palestinians, especially between Gaza and the West Bank, since 1991, but in the past few months this process took a qualitative jump with the introduction of the “infiltration law,” essentially allowing the Israeli authorities to remove anyone, no questions asked, to the place of residence on their ID, and then prevent them from leaving indefinitely. You can see what this means for MisbaH. He has spent the last decade building his life in Ramallah, but has been offered the opportunity of his life – to travel the world and develop his skills so that he can come back and use them in the community he loves and which he helped create. But upon return, the likely situation is that the Israeli officials will look at his ID, see Gaza residency, and take him there immediately. He left a week ago and is currently in Berlin – we’ll have to wait and see how it all turns out, but for now he’s a free man for the first time in his life.

After dinner at MisbaH’s we went to one of the many and growing number of pubs in Ramallah servicing the international community, the new rich, and the returning Palestinian community. Full of a mix of Palestinian artists, international aid workers and foreign students, the atmosphere is reminiscent of what I would imagine southern Italy or Spain to be – open stone patio with refreshingly cool breeze, lively conversation, warm-weather trees like pomegranate, lime, pepper, and fig bearing young fruits hanging around. We were all drinking Taybeh, the delicious Palestinian beer that was recently highlighted by the New York Times. The brewery was started by members of that returning Palestinian community, a family who had lived in Massachusetts for decades before returning to the West Bank to help develop the economy. Looking at the bottle, one is struck by a very strange feature – there’s not so much as a single Arabic letter on the bottle, not even so much as the word Taybeh spelled out in the language of its country of origin. This sort of thing throws the enigma that is Ramallah into relief – a growing rift between the rich and the poor, an uneasiness with the pace of economic growth and development for a people whose identity is so largely wrapped up in the struggle against the occupation and the resistance, wrapped up in being the victims of unjust Israeli aggression and occupation.

After a great night, the next morning I hopped back on the il-quds (Jerusalem) bus and headed back through the checkpoint at Kalandia. I, of course, am armed with my Canadian passport, and so the wave of annoyance and aggression from the female soldier behind the glass in the bleak room of the checkpoint broke on my privileged status. “ID, passport, SOMETHING, ANYTHING!?” she yelled as I walked by. Placing my passport up against the glass, I was let right through without further questions, but a couple of younger men behind me got the full brunt of her anger, perhaps frustrated that I snubbed her attempt to assert her power. After the checkpoint, it was smooth sailing back to the Damascus Gate of the Old City, and then a leisurely walk through the Arab Quarter, Christian Quarter, and Armenian Quarter, out the Zion Gate, and into West Jerusalem again, where it is too easy to imagine that all of the past 12 hours, visiting that part of Israel which complexifies the myth, doesn’t exist at all. Having picked up a couple of Taybeh’s in East Jerusalem, I brought them to the Shabbat lunch of my good friend Adi from the Machon last semester. The crowd was the Ramah camp crowd, the American Jewish Jerusalem bubble. We opened the Taybeh, which was quickly dubbed the “peace beer”, and made a little toast “l’Shalom” (to peace), while a couple of the guys, one of whom had made aliyah and was in army service, muttered audibly “I don’t believe in peace”. After we had finished the Taybeh, Adi, who’s never one to let political correctness stand in the way of a good joke (one of the things I love about him), went to the fridge, pulled out an Israeli beer (Goldstar), and announced “alright, now who wants some Apartheid beer?” We spent the afternoon playing wiffle baseball in a little empty lot in West Jerusalem, and they reminisced about camp. We joked around and had a great time.

After this year, I don’t think I’ll be able to fully be in Israel without also being in Palestine. In the old city one of the oddest phenomena around is the rows of hanging t-shirts for sale, and in two rows side by side you have a IDF shirts and creepy shirts that say Uzi does it, and Free Palestine and Yassir Arafat for President. Lastly, you have I love Israel and I love Palestine side by side. But here's the thing, you can’t be pro-Palestinian or pro-Israeli without losing sight of the fact that the two narratives, the two peoples, the two cultures, form two sides to the same coin - you simply can't understand Israel without understanding Palestine, and vice versa. You have to be pro-justice and pro-humanity, and see where that leads you.

"In its hour of need, Israel was let down by Diaspora"

2010-06-12T02:50:00.001-04:00

Here is an important article from the Israeli daily Ha'aretz, calling on diaspora Jews to practice some tough love on Israel:

Criticizing the IDF is too easy. The real blame lies with successive Israeli governments and the broad public that are not brave enough to end the 42-year-old occupation and prefer instead to throw the army at the problem. As good as our army is, the result will only be more and more bloodshed. So how do we deal with it? By convincing ourselves that we are the moral ones and everyone else just wants to kill us.
If only we had some real friends, friends we could trust implicitly, who could point out the error of our ways. This could be the shining moment of the Jewish Diaspora. They love us, but they also see things from another perspective. We need a strong, unified voice from the Jewish leadership in the United States and Europe telling Israelis enough is enough, you are hurtling down the slippery slope of pariahdom and causing untold damage to yourselves and us. Lift your heads above the ramparts and see that the world has moved on.
Instead, we find the establishment of the Jewish world crouching with us in the bunker.

I'm going to repeat my call again to Jews around the world, if you love Israel, to join in the growing chorus of those who find Israel's policies and actions further and further from their own world view. Standing with Israel may mean denouncing it publicly and with a loud voice, and pulling it back from precipice it is slowly approaching, rather than cheering it on.

A Community of Peace in a Moment of Crisis

2010-06-01T03:07:00.001-04:00

There’s nothing like a crisis in your region to increase your readership, and the bar on my Google Analytics monitoring spiked yesterday. I realized, though, that what I wrote yesterday was knee-jerk, following the media feed, and that I’m not really in the position to evaluate what’s going on. Even the update I provided, based on speaking to more people and reading a wider variety of sources after a day of statements, press releases, and media frenzy, all I did was really parrot what was going on online, and add to it some real thoughts, feelings and frustrations that were searching for an outlet. They found that outlet through the crack that formed in all of our sanity yesterday. Therefore, I would like you all to read the previous post as an exercise in the hazards of new media citizen journalism and jumping to conclusions, but please take the latter half of the second paragraph seriously, about the future of Israel. I’m not going to change anything about what I wrote yesterday, to preserve it as a real moment in time.

But I also realized that I didn’t talk at all about what I’m actually qualified to talk about, and what I’m sure is much more interesting for someone reading this blog – and that’s what happened here at the Machon. Leading up to the event, a flurry of e-mails went around about the Free Gaza flotilla, with some barbs and quips as people voiced their political views, but nothing that our community doesn’t daily absorb in stride. Then, early in the morning as news started filtering in, the magnitude of the events began to manifest itself. Immediately people were shaken up, furious, confused, and scared. People lost their minds a little bit, cried, yelled, and waited impatiently for the next update. Angry political e-mails were balanced by exhortations to come together and support each other through this, and there were even a few frantic half-baked plans to get up to Ashdod for demonstrations. Then there were the official statements from the Machon administration (who we all know very well, small as this place is) telling us to remain calm, hang together as a group, not jump to conclusions, and especially not to jump into demonstrations and political acts without full knowledge of what will be going on, the nature of the demonstrations, who is organizing, et cetera.

You also have to realize that we’re not just a peace group; we’re a school/community. Classes went forward, and people agonized over having to split their time between researching, writing, and preparing for our flurry of final projects and being with each other and processing this news as a group. Seriously, who cares about the minutiae of the differences between market-based and command-and-control environmental policy at a time like this? I have to say that it was probably not the most productive academic day in the Machon’s history. At the day’s end though, two major things spontaneously emerged from our group – a screaming session in the desert out back of the kibbutz to vent and relieve our frustrations (thank you BKR), and a listening circle on campus to check in and gauge where we all are, share our feelings and views, and most of all to reaffirm our friendship, community, and devotion to dialogue and peace through the worst of the conflict. I can only imagine what things looked like here last January, during the Gaza war.

Life goes on here, and we all stumble forward through the feelings in our stomachs and the slight trauma to our psyches. But much more importantly than anything I wrote yesterday, which you can read about a million places on the web, I wanted to broadcast to the world the reality of what goes on at this amazing place in the middle of the desert – in the midst of this crisis that is polarizing the world, Jews from North America and Israel, Palestinians, and Jordanians came together to vent, yell, hug, cry, share, support, and build. At a time when people from every side were using the senseless violence out at sea to polarize and divide, we used it to come together and build our community even stronger.

Let’s be clear. This isn’t easy. Some people, especially the Arab students but far from exclusively, will be getting excessive heat from their families and home communities for being stupid, young, idealistic and naive enough to be collaborating with an enemy at a time like this. And at times like these it is easiest to give up and yourself question what the hell you’re doing here, especially if you’ve made personal sacrifices and are watching relations in the region deteriorate despite all that we’ve gained in this little island in the desert. I’m different. I’m from Canada, with a Canadian passport, with an out if things get tough. I grew up in secure, wealthy countries where things like this just didn’t happen and I feel disoriented and over my head. I am endlessly inspired by the people around me, whose courage surpasses by orders of magnitude anything from fools who hide behind weapons and violence. The truly radical person believes that utopia is possible, despite the odds. Albert Camus wrote in the Rebel: The rebel “attacks a shattered world in order to demand unity from it. He opposes the principle of justice which he finds in himself to the principle of injustice which he sees being applied in the world...all he wants, originally, is to resolve this contradiction and establish the reign of justice.” I am convinced more and more every day that non-violence, peace-building, reaching out, and fighting injustice by living a just life full of good and hard work, with respect for each other and our environment, is the only way to the salvation of our fully global community.

Hard work and hope

Trump hard luck and trouble

This world is it; I will make it my home

This world is it; I will make it my own

-Old Man Luedecke, from Just Like a River

Outrage: At least 10 Dead and dozens injured as the IDF attacks Gaza Aid Fleet

2010-05-31T03:30:00.009-04:00

[update 10:00 pm Israel time - The more the story comes out, the more I'm ashamed of both sides, especially the so-called humanitarian activists [updated update - it appears that the violence came only from one ship, populated by radicals, while the others were dealt with peacefully]. The activists, it seems, deceived the IDF with white flags and promises of non-violence, only to pull out metal pipes, knives, and bats and immediately begin to beat soldiers, who at first only used riot dispersal methods like paintball guns and tear gas, and finally the activists stole pistols and opened fire. It seems that this act was what started the gunfire, though we can't be sure until the full story comes out. Even so, the actions of the Israeli navy seem disproportionate, and the loss of life severe. I don't know what fraction of the flotilla was aware of this plan, as it happened only on one boat, and only about 30 people were initially involved, but clearly this is not the way a peaceful, humanitarian mission behaves. Shame on those who use violence. I'm not going to change what I wrote before about standing up to the Occupation and taking back Israel, which I truly believe, but I have to admit I jumped to conclusions about the flotilla event]

Some of you might have been aware in the last week or so of an international aid flotilla of nine ships that set sail for Gaza in order to "break the siege" that has been going on for nearly 4 years, since Hamas took power in the strip. You can read about the Flotilla on their own site here. The boats are loaded with thousands of tons of aid in the form of medicine, food, medical supplies, and importantly, no firearms of any kind, even in the possession of the people on board. In the past few days the PR machines of both sides revved into high gear as the moment of confrontation approached, and the whole world watched to see what would happen. IDF ships left Sunday evening in the hopes of having the confrontation at night where cameras would be useless, but the flotilla changed course to force the situation into the daylight. According to news sources and accounts from people on board, the IDF intercepted the ships off the coast, many said in international waters. Events following are somewhat unclear, but what is clear is that the IDF used tear gas and live ammunition on unarmed international civilians, potentially in international waters, wounding dozens and killing at least 10. You can find the stories in the NYTimes, Guardian UK, and I'm sure any reputable news source around.
I, for one, am outraged, and can't find the words to describe the confusion. Yes, Gaza is a closed military zone, and I would have been quite disappointed (but not surprised) if the IDF stopped the ships, commandeered the cargo, and deported the people. This would be the procedure of most countries given the situation. But what happened is inexcusable and absurd. In their defense, army radio reported that activists tried to grab guns from the soldiers' hands. Are you kidding me? Maybe I'm naive and stupid, but why do you even need to bring guns aboard these ships, full of unarmed civilians? Speaking to my parents last night I heard about an Israel rally in Toronto, where Netanyahu spoke. Those of you who've known me since high school know that I've always been ambivalent about these rallies and have not gone, and went through that high school leftist phase (or perhaps transition? I feel like I'm still in it), but in light of this last event, I feel like urging everyone I know to stay home, or, better yet, go with with signs: "This is not MY Israel", "Not in my name", "End the Occupation", and so on. I urge you not to fall into the trap of "with us or against us", or the inane and polarizing idea that unflinching support of Israel is the only thing that will not "give hope to Israel's enemies" or ridiculous ideas like that. North American Jews like to take solace in the idea that these sorts of incidents are "isolated." The cases of outrageous racism and murder by IDF soldiers during the Gaza war, the incidents of humiliation and violence by soldiers at check points and in the West Bank, the settler violence, the cases of racism and prejudice in planning and decision making...all of these things are becoming more and more systemic, not isolated. If you haven't had a chance to look through the accounts of soldiers at Breaking the Silence, I urge you to You have to understand that if you don't take back Israel now from the direction it is heading (read the article from the NYReview of books from my last post), you will wake up one morning to find you are blindly supporting an Apartheid regime, violent and self-destructive, and you will have to answer to that.

A smattering of goings on

2010-05-25T03:45:00.004-04:00

[note: my interview with the french CBC will air at 7:20 am Toronto time on 860 AM or 90.3 FM]

Sorry it has been so long, and I haven't completed the water trip story yet, we've been busy here preparing for finals and going on surprise desert outings. I will try and give a fuller update soon. Here are just a few things going on:

A peaceful protest I attended about a month ago turned violent last week when soldiers started making arrests and firing tear gas. The protest is a non-violent protest against the wanton appropriation of Palestinian land to build the separation wall:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fJvQM7VRbvk

A really interesting article in the New York Review of books reviews the growing rift between what American Jews imagine Israel to be (a light upon the nations, a peaceful, just, democratic state) and what it is actually becoming on the ground ( a state in which about 50 percent of the population would take rights away from Israeli Arabs and expel Palestinians from the West Bank, and in which governmental structures are beginning to follow suit):

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2010/jun/10/failure-american-jewish-establishment/?page=1

About a week ago we got a visit from the deputy prime minister of Israel, "Bogey" Ya'alon, who gave us a talk on his experiences and his views on the conflict and a potential peace. We both seemed to believe that projects like ours, where real interaction and peace-building happen between peoples, is a good place to start, but in terms of macropolicy we were definitely at odds. This, after all, was a man quoted as saying: "The virus 'Peace Now,' and if you will, the elites - damage they can cause is very great. As far as I'm concerned, Jews can, and should live in all of the Land of Israel forever." I'm happy to say that the session was conducted very civilly, though it did leave a number of people quite frustrated.

I have recently heard a good many people talking about a new Israeli political movement called the National Left, which is an attempt to take back Zionism from the settler movement, which has called any leftist anti-Zionist and ant-Israel. Their manifesto is free online, and was banned from book stores in Israel after pressure from settler groups. You can find it here:

www.fas.org/irp/dni/osc/israel-left.pdf

In other news, Ontario premier Dalton Mcguinty will be visiting the Arava Institute tomorrow, May 26th! He's on an Israel trip to promote ties between Ontario and Israel in science and technology, especially renewable energy, and will get to hear from a panel of students. I was also interviewed about this visit on the French CBC, and the interview will hopefully air tomorrow. I will let you know when I know exactly what time it will be.

And finally, I will be presenting a paper at the Israeli Society for the History and Philosophy of Science annual meeting this Sunday! The paper is about Julien Offray de la Mettrie, the 18th century French philosopher and physician who published a book called "The Man Machine" in which he maintained that Descartes was right about living bodies being machines, but wrong about there being a separate substance of the soul. Mettrie decided that all living phenomena could arise from organized matter alone, laying the groundwork for metaphysical naturalism in physiology, and getting him promptly booted out of France.
More news as it comes.

Nakba

2010-05-16T03:25:00.001-04:00

Today was officially Nakba day, and there was a low key event on campus consisting of a little exhibition of photographs and narratives from pre-Nakba Arab Palestine - names of villages that are forever gone, stories of the people who were forced off of their land, never to return - the flip side of the triumphant Zionist narrative that so many of us grow up with. I don't think I will ever entirely discount the side of the narrative that led to the successful creation of the State of Israel, an accomplishment that will always blow my mind and send shivers down my spine problematic as the narrative may be, but to fully understand the implications of the creation of Israel, you also need to understand the Nakba. And tonight, after experiencing the representations that the Palestinian students put together, complete especially with a poem about a village, an identity, and a way of life lost, I returned to my caravan somber. I will always be who I am, and proud of Israel and all it had accomplished, the fact that it was nothing but a dream but a century ago and today it has just joined the OECD. But being proud of Israel needs to also reside in the mind with knowing the full implications of Israel's existence as a Jewish State. A little while ago I got a mass e-mail from someone close to me, mostly dealing with Israel's wonderful accomplishments, but ending with these lines:

In contrast to the efforts of tiny Israel to make contributions to the world so as to better mankind, one has to ask what have those who have strived to eliminate Israel from the face of the earth done other than to create hate and bloodshed???

So I decided to add my little piece of mind to the discourse, and hopefully all of you out there can help me. If you ever get an e-mail with a piece of rhetoric like this, please respond with this little message, modified in whatever way makes it appropriate:

This is my response to those e-mails that attempt to fan the flames of animosity, prejudice, and hatred of Jews towards Arabs and Palestinians in particular. They float around the internet in many Jewish circuits, and I've gotten many before. I know that this kind of message is coming from a place of anxiety, pain, and fear, and thus needs a dose of understanding, not argument.

It indeed makes me very proud that Israel has been, and continues to be a pioneer in so many different areas, has weathered the current economic situation with such relative ease, and in many ways continues to be a "light unto the nations". Not included in this list, but almost equally as important, is Israel's many humanitarian accomplishments. Two days ago I was running programs with Sudanese refugees in Eilat, and in February I was a full-time volunteer with Save a Child's Heart in Tel Aviv, which has performed heart surgery for thousands of children in need from Africa, Asia, Eastern Europe, Iraq, and (about half the children come from) the Palestinian Territories. And we can only point to the mission in Haiti (which my masters supervisor was involved with) to see what Israel is capable of.

But proud as I was of most of the e-mail, I was somewhat shocked with the last paragraph, which was not worthy of a group that is "a light unto the nations". I have had the privilege through my 7 months thus far at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies (www.arava.org) to live, study, work, travel, eat, and argue with a student body that is 1/3 International, 1/3 Israeli Jewish, and 1/3 Arab (Israeli Arab, West Bank Palestinian, and Jordanian). Words like those attached to the end of that e-mail are dehumanizing and hurtful, and are easy enough to say from the safety of an e-mail distributed only to Jews of a certain frame of mind. But I feel that as part of a generation of youth attempting to challenge the status quo of fear, anger, and prejudice in all of our communities and cultures, I have to object. I have stayed at my friends' family homes in Ramallah, Bethlehem, and Irbid, and have met wonderful people who have taken me in and treated me like family. I have met young people striving to make a change in their communities and their world, who will be engineers, physicians, poets, teachers, and future leaders, who have loved and lost and have big dreams. I guess what I'm saying is that when we dehumanize the other, we dehumanize ourselves, and peace and justice fly from our grasp. So, the next time something like this comes across your computer screen, by all means pass on the pride and joy of Jewish accomplishment, but please leave the rest.

The Water Trip Part 1

2010-05-07T10:55:00.002-04:00

It's been a little while since I posted anything, and I had to skip this week's Late Night Thoughts, but all for very good reason - this past week we took our semester trip to talk about the other elephant in the room when it comes to this part of the world: water. Here's political map of the area so you can follow the route and a water map so you can more easily see what I'm talking about:

As you know, Ketura is just along the Jordan border about 50 km from Eilat, which along with the Jordanian city of Aqaba resides on the northernmost tip of the Gulf of Aqaba. I would like to say that it was as simple as everyone piling into the bus and crossing into Jordan at the Eilat-Aqaba border crossing, but you should be aware by now if you've been reading the blog thus far that nothing is as simple as that with a group like ours. The Palestinian students are not allowed by their permits to enter the municipality of Eilat for whatever ridiculous reason (why Eilat of all places? They can go anywhere else!), and therefore can't cross over from Eilat to Aqaba. So they had to leave a couple days early and cross over at a different border crossing (The Allenby Bridge - King Hussein crossing) nearer to Jerusalem and Amman. The question came up in a meeting why we couldn't all cross with the Palestinians as a show of solidarity. Well, it turns out that the crossing the Palestinians were using is actually just for Palestinians, being as it is in Area A (Israelis can't go there), and Israeli and Jordanian authorities don't grant Visas to international passport holders visas for this crossing. It can take all day for the Palestinians to cross the border, seeing as they have to pass through not two, but three authorities - Palestinian, Israeli, and then Jordanian. So it had to happen that the Palestinians left two days early, went to Amman first and then met us in Wadi Mujib on the first day, after we had crossed into Jordan at Eilat-Aqaba.

      Just to give a brief synopsis of the purpose of the trip, it essentially hinges on the political ecology of water in the Jordan River Basin. There are four major riparians (bodies - usually states but with an exception in this case - that have claim to a right of water use in a basin) in the Jordan River Basin: Syria, Israel, Jordan, and Palestine. Lebanon and Egypt have marginal claim, but they're not very important in the political scheme of things, each having their own much more important water supply. Excepting groundwater, there is one major water source supplying water to Israel, Jordan, and Palestine - the Jordan River Basin, which arises out of a few tributaries in the north of Israel, flows through the Hula Valley and into the Sea of Galilee (Lake Kineret in Hebrew, the little blue patch on the line demarcating the Golan Heights in the map). From there it "flows" south into the Dead Sea, which is as good a place as any to start.

    The first stop in Jordan, Wadi Mujib, was all about the Dead Sea. The water level in the sea has been dropping at a rate of approximately 1 meter a year for about 30 years, and shows no sign of stopping anytime soon. At current rates, the sea will salinate to the point where no more evaporation will take place - about 200 meters shallower than currently, with only 1/3 the surface area. Why is this happening? The reason can be summed up pretty well in the words of one of the Jordanian water authorities we met along the way: in the current water management mentality, any water that is not "used" in some way is a waste. After all, currently Jordan is the most water stressed country in the Middle East with a water deficit of hundreds of millions of cubic meters (i.e. the amount that demand outstrips supply) and Israel is also water stressed especially in the summer months. Therefore, every little bit of water worth using is used, and Wadi Mujib is a good example. Rain falls far more abundantly in the mountains that run parallel to the Israeli border than in the dry Arava Valley in which runs the border south of the Dead Sea. Therefore, there are many rivers flowing out of these mountains and through wadis to the sea. Almost every single one, however, is dammed and diverted to supply domestic, industrial, and agricultural uses in the area - Wadi Mujib now barely makes it to the Dead Sea. The only reason it still does, if ever so slightly, is that a little water is let through the dam to provide tourists like us a little hike up a shallow river to a waterfall - but except for this tiny piece, the natural ecosystem that used to flourish along the river is entirely gone. The same is true for every little stream that used to flow into the Dead Sea - of the original 1.3 billion cubic meters that used to flow into it from the Jordan River, only 300 million still does, and this 300 million is made up entirely of a mix of fish farm waste, agricultural run-off, and untreated sewage water. The Dead Sea is essentially now a waste dump, and a shrinking one at that.

      Why is this a problem? After all, it's a "dead" sea right? It's not like we'll lose abundant treasures of biodiversity if the thing dries up. Nothing save a couple of halophilic (salt-loving) microbes even lives there. But let's think "upstream," so to speak, before returning downstream. Remember that bird migration map I showed in an earlier post that showed that most of Europe and Africa's migrating birds go through this part of the world on their journey? Well, diverting all of the natural water sources to provide for agriculture, industry, and domestic uses deprives those birds of their natural fueling spots, leaving them with the natural choice of turning to the farms and fields that the water irrigates. This creates huge problems with farmers, but more about this when I talk about Hula. Returning to the Dead Sea, the shrinking water level means that fresh water moves in to take its place, dissolving a large salt layer in the ground surrounding the sea and causing thousands of sinkholes tens of meters across, making it dangerous to hike, and making farming in the area a very uncertain affair - you might come out one morning to find that half your farm has collapsed, literally. Finally, there is a large amount of industry associated with the Dead Sea, largely consisting of tourism and mineral extraction from the water. If you look up at the water map, you'll see that there are really two Dead Seas, the lower one being nothing but shallow (~5 m) evaporation pools where nearly 40 percent of the world's potash, along with dozens of other minerals, is extracted. These evaporation pools also contribute significantly to the lower levels of the actual Dead Sea, although the Jordan River problem is almost an order of magnitude more significant. But as the Sea subsides, it is more and more costly to pump this water into the ponds, and the tourism will suffer as well.

(up next post - The Red-Dead Conduit, Amman, Irbid, and the Hula)

A rant prompted by the Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

2010-05-01T05:01:00.002-04:00

We're still acting as if the economy is the thing that's real, the thing with physical weight and force. We're acting as if the natural world is the abstraction, the intellectual concept that we can adjust to better suit our needs. That confusion will be the root of more disasters.

Jonathan Hiskes, "Worst Week Ever, brought to you by the fossil fuel insustry" - Grist.org

Only when the last tree has died and the last river been poisoned and the last fish been caught will we realise we cannot eat money.

-Cree proverb (or ostensibly so)

Cause I don't care too much for money, money can't buy me love

-Paul McCartney

I graduated from University of King's College in May of 2009, right about the heart of the financial crisis. During the convocation ceremony, president Bill Barker, in his speech to the graduating class, mused about the usual assumption that what happens in university liberal arts programs has nothing to do with the "real world." He called on us to question just how real the "real world" is, given that it seemed to be driven by quantities of wealth and value that vanished almost overnight. Where did they go? How did hundreds of thousands of houses get half-built on the momentum of financing that dried up like so many of the world's current rivers? The dreams of the homeowners were real, but their resources dried up. And yet we don't seem to learn.

If you want to know about the real world, you have to talk to an ecosystem ecologist, who meticulously studies the Earth's biota as systems, drawing originally from the engineering methods of systems thinking. Ecosystem ecologists note every input, transformation, and output from ecosystems, measuring the essential nutrient cycles and energy flows - they are the accountants of the biological world. They, more than any other branch of study, are aware of one of the most important contributions that ecology has made to human thought: "'Life'" is an ecological property; it is only an individual property for a brief flash of time." (Clair Folsome, 1979) Life, in effect, is just a very, very complex way of doing a simple thing: turning the sun’s energy into heat. Until roughly 500,000 years ago, when hominids began to deliberately use fire, the only way for an organism to procure energy for its own use was to either get it directly from the sun (autotrophy) or indirectly through eating autotrophs (heterotrophy). This system forms a tight nutrient and energy cycle in which every living thing is dependent on every other. It has to be remembered that, aside from the energy stored in the atom (nuclear energy), the ONLY way for energy to enter the earth's system is from the sun. All that fossil fuel being burned right now is old sunlight, captured and stored for over 300 million years by the Earth's former living systems.

One time I was riding with my mom in her car, talking about these things, and she mused "We're so damn smart, it's amazing to me why we haven't solved the energy issue yet." And so I used an economic metaphor. For the past 300 million years or so, the Earth's ecosystems have been putting a little bit of the energy allowance they received into their savings (fossil fuel deposits). They haven't ever gotten a raise in the allowance, but even still, every day, month, year, century, they have put a little bit away for the future. Every generation of plant, animal, microbe, and fungus has faithfully passed on this savings to the next generation, adding a tiny bit themselves. This goes on for 300 million years. Then comes Homo sapiens. We still haven't gotten a raise in our original allowance, but we've discovered the password to that savings account! We haven't changed our INCOME, but we've found a lot of SAVINGS. The economics systems we invented, however, don't make any distinction between that energy input that comes from our savings and that which comes from our income - it treats it all like income! We're spending our capital as if it is cash-flow! It doesn't matter how "smart" we are if the basic fact of our energy allowance has not changed, and we seem to be blind to that. The only "smart" thing to do would be to start recognizing this, tightening our energy belts, focusing on how to get the most out of our meagre income, and maybe investing those last savings into improving our ability to do so rather than destroying the last of that ability.

Clean rivers can be exploited to run industry, generate power, and thus make money. Forests can be cut down and their lumber sold as wood or pulp in exchange for money. Soils can be exploited to the point of desertification to produce cash crops to sell for money. But, as the law of entropy will tell you (used loosely), these processes are much easier to perform one way than the other. In the same way that you can't turn an omelet back into a whole egg, you can't turn numbers in a bank account back into healthy rivers, healthy soils, and bio-diverse forests. When a species is gone, it's GONE. When groundwater is polluted, it takes immense resources to remediate it. When the climate is forced to new energy levels by greenhouse gasses, the energy momentum of the system is a real bitch to bring under control. And the real tragedy is that once we really figure out how much energy and resources we'll need to correct our problems, we'll have spent most of our savings, and wished we'd actually spent it on something worthwhile.

An Earth Day full of Paradox

2010-04-25T17:42:00.002-04:00

So, my commitment to sticking to nothing but personal awe in my contribution to the Earth Day discourse got diverted slightly through reading a couple of articles that were sent my way, the first by my daily NYTimes feed and the second posted on Facebook by the lovely Lauren Rauch, a program assistant at the Machon.

The Times piece is titled "At 40, Earth Day Is Now Big Business" and chronicles the uneasy bed-fellowship of the environmental movement and big businesses. My favorite feature of the article, exemplifying what many would see as the blatant co-option of the environmental message just to push more useless crap, is the Peat the Penguin toy:

According to the article:

F. A. O. Schwarz is taking advantage of Earth Day to showcase Peat the Penguin, an emerald-tinted plush toy that, as part of the Greenzys line, is made of soy fibers and teaches green lessons to children. The penguin, Greenzys promotional material notes, “is an ardent supporter of recycling, reusing and reducing waste.”

Now, the fact that its made from soy fibres might at first glance seem like a win, but likely those soy fibres are coming from former rain-forest in Brazil, not a family farm down the road. That aside though, I suppose that if it came down to the question of which toy to buy your child, starting with the assumption that they need a brand new toy every so often, a little bird that spews a conservation ethic is definitely preferable to many other toys. As a bit more of a radical though, I would say that by wedding the superficial conservation ethic to a tangible act of simple consumerism, the act is self-defeating or even counter-productive. The blatant greenwashing involved leads to the good feeling of having "done the right thing," without having to actually change your way of life one bit. This is the ultimate goal of green capitalism: simply replacing the paralyzing array of consumer choices with "sustainable" choices which don't deplete resources. That way we can have modernization, economic growth, and sustainability without having to do anything differently! Now, this is theoretically possible, but it's just so much easier to put the money into advertising green than to actually making green products, and with current technologies (and projecting them into the near to mid term), it just seems out of the realm of credibility to assume we can really have it all without facing the hard reality and doing the real work of changing our legislation and lifestyles.

The article closes with a quote from Robert Stone, a film maker who documents the American Environmental movement:

“Every Earth Day is a reflection of where we are as a culture,” he said. “If it has become commoditized, about green consumerism instead of systemic change, then it is a reflection of our society.”

Well put.

The second article is from Mondoweiss, described on its website as : "a news website devoted to covering American foreign policy in the Middle East, chiefly from a progressive Jewish perspective." This article, titled "Earth Day in Israel: Apartheid Showing Through the Greenwash" and written by Stephanie Westbrook, also covers Earth Day from the perspective of scratching the surface to see just what's under the greenwashing. Those put off by the term "apartheid" in the title can be justifiably perturbed, and I certainly wouldn't advocate the term, but the article does point out some incredibly troubling stark contrasts in the realm of environmental justice. While across Israel people participated in the voluntary blackout to raise awareness of energy consumption and in Tel Aviv a concert was powered largely by generator running on vegetable oil and volunteers on power-generating bicycles

The irony was not lost on the 1.5 million residents of Gaza who have been living with daily power outages lasting hours on end for nearly three years due to the Israeli siege on the coastal territory. The Israeli Coordinator of Government Activities in the Territories (COGAT) reports that over 100 million liters of fuel were allowed into Gaza in 2009, however as Gisha points out, that amounts to only 57% of the need. As summer approaches bringing peak demands, spare parts and tools for turbine repair are in dire need. There are currently over 50 truckloads of electrical equipment awaiting approval by the Israeli authorities for entry to Gaza.

While Israelis go starry-eyed over planting trees and preserving green space

Palestinian farmers from the West Bank village of Qaryut near Nablus had their own tree planting ceremony in honor of Earth Day, only to find the 250 olive tree saplings uprooted by Israeli settlers from Givat Hayovel. Another 300 were uprooted during the night of April 13 outside the Palestinian village of Mihmas by settlers from the nearby Migron outpost. The Palestinian Land Research Center estimates that over 12000 olive trees were uprooted throughout the West Bank in 2009, with Israeli authorities responsible for about 60%, clearing the land for settlements and construction of the wall, and Israeli settlers the rest.

Finally, the starkest contrast comes in the realm of water. The Israeli Ministry of Environmental Protection had a contest and gave out awards for IDF groups that did well in a water conservation contest while

For Palestinians living in the West Bank, this "protection of water sources" was documented in Amnesty International's October 2009 report Troubled Water: "The Israeli army’s destruction of Palestinian water facilities – rainwater harvesting and storage cisterns, agricultural pools and spring canals – on the grounds that they were constructed without permits from the army is often accompanied by other measures that aim to restrict or eliminate the presence of Palestinians from specific areas of the West Bank."
The Amnesty International report also notes that for decades, Israeli settlers have instead "been given virtually unlimited access to water supplies to develop and irrigate the large farms which help to support unlawful Israeli settlements." And nowhere is this more evident than the Jordan Valley where 95% of the area is occupied by Israeli settlements, plantations and military bases and where "Israeli water extraction inside the West Bank is highest."

Now, if this isn't tantamount to Apartheid, I'd at least go so far as to say it is racist. Many people would argue that I'm picking on Israel, using a double standard, etc. But the fact remains: Israel has the power. If your goal was to breed extremism, I'd probably suggest a similar use of power as the one that Israel uses constantly in the uprooting of trees and livelihoods and the wanton and pointless destruction of property that clearly poses no security threat (e.g. rainwater harvesting and cisterns!). My thought is that there is no peace and sustainability without justice, and right now we are a very long way away from justice.

First Post at Late Night Thoughts!

2010-04-24T05:35:00.000-04:00

On Cultural Evolution in birds, myths surrounding Charles Darwin's trip to the Galapagos, and the Beatles!

You can find it HERE

Happy Earth Day!

2010-04-22T09:48:00.003-04:00

Happy 40th birthday Earth Day!

After 40 years, the environment is, I think on the agenda for good, and thus that particular function of Earth Day is worn a little thin - raise your hands if you want another admonishment about how we're treating the planet? How about another 500 top ten lists about how to green everything from your wardrobe to your sex life? No longer do we need to use the day as a platform from which to cry out all of the problems going on in the bio-social matrix of the planet - if you're not aware of the precariousness of the situation, you probably aren't reading this. In fact, you probably aren't reading anything. As an example of how windows of interest function for policy-makers, our environmental policy prof showed us a sequence of magazine covers with specials on climate change: first Times, then Newsweek, then Business Week, then...Sports Illustrated?........then.........Vanity Fair! Earth Day as an annual town crier's bell is a little outmoded by this point.

So on this Earth Day, I thought that I would contribute to the whole discourse by simply shouting out to the primordial feeling of Awe that I often get just conceiving of the immensity and beauty of the World and all that it holds. The following is just a brief foray into it. Let's go back to the image that set the whole Earth Day thing in motion - the very first pictures of Earth from space, taken in 1968:

I grew up reading science writers who evoked wonder at every turn, whose goal was to turn the everyday observation into a meditation on the beauty all around us, who effected me so much that I have never stopped staring into the night sky with utter delight, never stopped chattering to whoever will listen about how wonderful insects and microbes are, and have never failed to, at least once a day, be humbled by the immensity of all I don't know. Carl Sagan's reflection on the photo of earth from space comes from his famous Pale Blue Dot:

From this distant vantage point, the Earth might not seem of particular interest. But for us, it's different. Consider again that dot. That's here, that's home, that's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there – on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

I don't know whether, on first hearing about the theory of Evolution, it struck me as odd - it certainly should have!. I'd like to think that I got as excited about it then as I do now, but I have no way of knowing. I do know that Evolution is what tipped the scales towards the study of Biology when I was going into the third year of my undergraduate degree. I was trying to decide between Biology and Physics - I loved them both - but in the end I just needed to study Life! Joseph Wood-Krutch articulates why better than I ever could:

If I wanted to comtemplate what to me is the deepest of all mysteries, I should choose as my object lesson a snowflake under a lens and an amoeba under a microscope. To the detached observer - if one can possibly imagine any observer who could be detached when faced with such an ultimate choice - the snowflake would certainly seem the "higher" of the two. Against its intricate glistening perfection one would have to place a shapeless, slightly turbid glob, perpetually oozing out in this direction or that but not suggesting so strongly as the snowflake does, intelligence and plan. Crystal and collid, the chemist would call them, but what an inconceivable contrast those neutral terms imply! Like the star, the snowflake seems to declare the glory of God, while the promise of the amoeba, given only perhaps to itself, seems only contemptible. But its jelly holds, nevertheless, not only its promise but ours also, while the snowflake represents some achievement which we cannot possibly share. After the passage of billions of years, one can see and be aware of the other, but the relationship can never be reciprocal. Even after these billions of years no aggregate of colloids can be as beautiful as the crystal always was, but it can know, as the crystal cannot, what beauty is.

And finally, to second that feeling, the immortal closing lines to the Origin of Species (which I know by heart :-)

There is grandeur in this view of life, with its several powers, having been originally breathed into a few forms or into one; and that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.

We have been given a wonderful, incomparable gift in our existence, in our planet, in our mysterious and often hilarious minds. Today, I just want to say thanks. I motion that Earth Day, from now on, be less a clarion call and more of a Great, universal Thanksgiving - I think it would do a lot more good that way.

Yeled Tov Yerushalayim

2010-04-21T11:49:00.000-04:00

Much to the relief of my grandfather, I have shaved my beard off and will be keeping it off for a while (no more one-month shaving cycle!). I've also largely been wearing my glasses instead of my contacts. The overall look is slightly different to the one at the top of the page. And yes, thank you, I know that I look just like my father :-)

The look prompted my caravan-mate, Itai, to remark that I'm turning into a "Yeled tov Yerushalayim", a hebrew euphemism that was new to me. It translates pretty much as a "good boy from Jerusalem." In other words, a bit of a goody-two-shoes know it all wimp with a nasally voice. I'll let you decide.

Late Night Thoughts on the Wonders of Science and Nature

2010-04-19T07:13:00.000-04:00

I'm starting a new blog! Having altogether far too little on my plate, and getting far too much sleep for my own well being, I have decided to expand my online presence and colonize a new, empty spot in cyberspace titled Late Night Thoughts on the Wonders of Science and Nature :

A personal project of science writing and explanation, where I will peruse the weekly offerings of the world's two most famous science journals and pick my favorite article or two to offer up to the blogosphere.

Can't afford to stay behind the times in this business! Research blogging is all the rage!

But don't worry, I will keep up Milk and Honey as if I Late Night Thoughts never popped into my mind.

Drops from the cup - the Machon approaches Israeli Independence Day

2010-04-16T21:50:00.005-04:00

During the passover seder, Jews around the world do something very special, something that lays the foundation for a modern ethic of reconciliation and empathy: as we recount the visiting of the ten plagues upon Egypt, the acts of God that led to our being able to pass from Mitzrayim (Egypt, literally a narrow, confined place) to the promised land of Israel, we spill a little bit of wine from our cups on the pronunciation of each plague. Wine symbolizes our rejoicing in freedom, but when we remember that our freedom came at the price of so much suffering for ordinary Egyptians we spill a little joy from our cups. Now, the origins of this ritual probably have very little to do with our modern humanistic interpretation - since the plagues visited the Egyptians but not the Jews, we remove them from our cups - but the contemporary interpretation speaks volumes about the central values of modern Judaism as I know it.

This Tuesday Israel will celebrate Yom Ha'atzmaut, or Independence Day, commemorating the establishment of the State of Israel in 1948 following the end of the British mandate of Palestine and the UN Partition plan of 1947. It is a day of unabashed joy in Israel, full of barbecues and fireworks, strategically placed the day after Yom HaZikaron, Israeli remembrance day. But while Israelis term the war of 1947-48 the war of independence, Palestinians have a different name for it: the Nakba, or "catastrophe". Just as the mythical displays of divine power that led to Jewish liberty 3,000 years ago also created much suffering amongst the Egyptian people, so Israeli independence was also won at a price:

"Jewish Villages were built on the remains of Arab villages. You don't even know the names of these Arab villages and I don't blame you because the geography books no longer exist. It is not only geography books that no longer exist, but also the Arab villages themselves disappeared. For Nahalal was established on the site of Ma'loul, Kibbutz G'vat on the site of Jebbata, Kibbutz Sarid in the place of Khneifes, and Kfar Yehoshua on the site of Tel Shoman. There is not one place built in this country that did not have a former Arab population."

-Moshe Dayan, from a speech at the Technion, 1969

The old myth that it was the Arab leaders who commanded over 700,000 Palestinians to leave their homes during the war is long dead, and I won't beat it further into the ground. While there was no official plan to displace the Arab population from Jewish areas (i.e. ethnic cleansing), the concept of minimizing the Arab population of a future Jewish state was explicitly discussed, and commanders in the field were given pretty free reign to do as they wished. In the early months of the civil war, before the Arab armies entered, the massacre of Arabs at Deir Yassin sent a strong message, and the words Deir Yassin were used as a battle cry later in the war by Jewish forces. The Palestinians left out of a mix of terror and force, the wealthy ones first - ensuring that leadership on the ground was scarce.

This is not meant to minimize the existential threat posed to the fledgling state of Israel by the situation, and the Arab leadership also openly discussed ethnic cleansing - the roiling conflict between Jewish and Arab national aspirations that was kept in check by British rule burst its seams in this conflict. But saying things like "Well, Israel accepted the partition plan while the Arabs didn't - they just wanted to drive us into the sea" as a justification for Jewish acts and a demonstration of Jewish moral superiority is inappropriately reading back into the situation that while the Arabs were bloodthirsty ethnic cleansers, the Jews were simply happy to live in their little state with an almost equal Arab population - if Israel had felt it was the stronger force at that point, whether it would have attempted to claim as much land as possible and displace as many Arabs as possible is an open question. If we approach the situation with such a sense of moral superiority, we have already dehumanized the other player, and when this happens the possibility of peace and justice flies from our grasp.

We now come to Independence Day. It is all well and good to spill wine from our cups to remember the ancient Egyptians 3,000 years ago. Can you ask Israeli society today, with all of its existential anxieties, security fears, and pain and suffering at the hands of Palestinian terrorism, to spill a little joy from Yom Ha'atzmaut to remember the human cost of its Independence? Many peace groups think that not only is this a good idea, but it is vital for the future reconciliation of the two peoples and thus Israel's very existence. Therefore, many groups have put on joint Yom Ha'atzmaut - Nakba day observances, and many have incorporated the Nakba narrative into the celebrations of Yom Ha'atzmaut. An example is a group called Zochorot, who state:

"Zochrot seeks to engage the Jewish public in Israel in remembering and talking about the Nakba, the Palestinian tragedy of 1948. The memory of the Nakba is a counter memory that challenges the Zionist version of events that most Jewish Israelis are taught from a young age and come to take for granted as “true.” The Nakba is in one sense the story of the Palestinian tragedy -- the destruction of the villages, the expulsions and the killing -- but it is also a fundamental part of the story of Jews who live here, of the victors of the 1948 war."

Here at the Machon we have made a decision: on Yom Ha'atzmaut, we will fly both the Israeli flag and the Palestinian flag, as a recognition that both peoples had and still have aspirations for independence, self-governance, and a life of dignity in this land, and until both peoples can acknowledge the right of the other to this dignity, the legacy of pain and suffering will be bequeathed to generations to come. So, this Yom Ha'atzmaut, I encourage everyone to do something symbolic to take a drop out of their cup of joy - only a drop - to begin to build towards reconciliation.

Back in Israel

2010-04-13T15:58:00.001-04:00

After 2 weeks back in Toronto for Pesach, I've touched down in Israel once again. It was a whirlwind visit, filled with little trips, tons of catching up over drinks of many sorts, and a lot of good family time, though some of it under less than desired circumstances. Thankfully, everything is back to some semblance of normality and my Zaide is on the road to full recovery. I even landed a job for July the day after I arrived in Toronto. I'll be working at a place called Children's Peace Theatre, out at Victoria Park, on their major annual project. You can read about it here, and I'm sure I'll have a lot to say about it in July too.

Just in the last few days, a new little piece of Israeli policy has put many people I know a bit on edge. I don't know enough about it to really say, but here and here are a couple of representative articles, and here is a little story on Al-Jazeera featuring a Gazan artist living in the West Bank who I met in Feburary. I'll keep updating as things develop.

But despite the turmoil, I'm very excited about being back in Israel, and going back to the Machon. Ketura Bound!

Thoughts from the Galilee

2010-03-27T15:08:00.003-04:00

“I really want to be a sniper”

“Yo, I don’t think you can be a (word in Hebrew – name of an IDF position) and also be a sniper”

“Dude, you totally can. There’s this guy on base, he’s totally badass, he’s like (Hebrew word) and a (another Hebrew word) and also a sniper. The guy’s nuts.”

“How’s your shooting coming?”

“I don’t know, not that great, I really need to work on it.”

“Man, I really want to be a paratrooper [very well regarded position in the IDF]. Just so afterwards I can hit on Taglit (birthright) girls and be all like ‘Do you know what a paratrooper does?’”

(laughter)

As you can probably imagine, this conversation was not overheard at the Machon. This weekend, before I go home to Toronto for Passover, I’m taking a couple days to visit my good friend Shoshi on the kibbutz where she and her garin stay. For those who don’t remember, a garin (meaning “nucleus” in English) is a group of people who come together before the army to spend a year doing volunteer work around Israel. In Shoshi’s case, however, the setup is a little different, since she made aliyah about the same time as I came to Israel and is known as a “lone soldier”. This means she has no family to live with in Israel, and so she’s put up on a kibbutz for her ulpan with a number of other lone soldiers, who essentially become her family. So here I am on Kibbutz Lavi (my heart) nestled on a hill overlooking the Galilee. This place is hardly recognizable as the same continent as Ketura, never mind the same country – it’s overcast, moist and cool, the vegetation lush and almost tropical, reminding me more than anything else of the Lake District in England. Having left the desert just six hours before, I’m reminded again just how diverse Israel is at pretty much every level. Standing with Shoshi and looking over the green hills patched together with orchards, fields, and forest, I’m reminded of what Rabbi Michael told us about the desert and how the barrenness forces you to bare your own soul. It’s hard to place the feeling up here, but beginning with the conversation I overheard upon arrival, I can say it felt as complicated as the landscape, clothing me in complexity, context, contingency, but not in a burdensome way.

Coming from a place where the basic assumption is that IDF is an institution always on precarious moral footing, carrying out, as a branch of the state, the occupation of the Palestinian Territories, it was a slight mental shock to jump right into the conversations of these bright eyed Olim Chadashim (new immigrants) about the ins and outs of army life. The practical jokes and the hierarchical structure of command, the long hikes with packs and the crappy food, whose job is viewed as prestigious and whose as bitchwork, discussions about learning to use different weapons and different military tactics, which guns are badass and how boring guard duty is. These are great kids, full of life, energy, and humor – the kind of kids I went to summer camp with. And their experience sounds a lot like summer camp, with the new dialect they bring back to describe the distinct IDF culture: everybody makes fun of everybody else’s jobs, they talk about which commanders are cool and which ones are harsh, and they come back to the kibbutz after a stint in service beat and tired, ready to sleep for a week. I have to say that the prospect of the whole thing is pretty attractive.

Last week a group of representatives from Dalton Mcguinty’s Ontario government came through the Machon, scoping it out for a potential visit from the premier. As a Torontonian, I was of course invited to be on the little panel of students they brought in to talk to the group, and the meeting was a lot of fun. Hopefully Dalton will come through, and I’ll get to meet him! I told this to Shoshi, and she got pretty excited, so I invited her down to the kibbutz should the occasion arise. She mentioned she’d want to come in uniform, and meet him in her full IDF garb, and I didn’t know exactly how to tell her it wasn’t a great idea. It’s of course no secret that almost all of the Israelis in the Machon served in the IDF, some even as officers. In fact, last semester we had a special two PELS sessions focused on the IDF where students who had served wrote about their experiences and then a representative panel was chosen to answer any questions anybody had for a good four hours. Then a similar exercise took place on the Palestinian side, where Palestinian students shared their experiences with the IDF. So the issue’s not underground. But as you may recall from my post about last term’s Negev trip, the IDF uniform does something to the Palestinians, and makes it very hard to separate their negative experiences with aggressive soldiers from the person wearing the uniform, even a very close friend.

Last PELS session, I was talking to Yousre, a Palestinian student who not only loved the Machon enough to stay for two semesters when he’d only planned to come for one, but even stayed on as a program assistant after that. Way back when, Yousre landed a job in Israel just one day before the second intifada, and on his first (and only) day, he had slipped and fallen coming up some stairs. Immediately, two people in the office came over to see if he was ok and if he needed any help. The way Yousre describe it, he was totally shocked. Growing up, the only experience most Palestinians have with Israelis is with soldiers, and he hadn’t imagined that an Israeli would ever show such kindness towards him. Though the intifada cut his position short, this one moment of kindness was crucial in his future pursuit of opportunities to meet more Israelis and explore peace-building. It’s a lesson – you never know what effect one little moment of kindness might have somewhere down the road.

As the situation in the region crumbles a little bit, and the US and Britain both turn cold shoulders to Israel in response to careless slights on Israel’s part, I hear the laughter and humanity of the new soldiers, and I think back to Tuesday night, when the Machon got together for culture night. We all got together and everyone shared their culture (or adopted or chosen culture) in a fun way. The night looked like this:

Leora and Me – two Canadian songs – Ahead by a Century by Tragically Hip and Crabbuckit by K-OS

Hila and Me – A demonstration of Capoeira, a Brazilian dance-fighting style

Assaf K and friends – Israeli pop songs

Assaf C and Amber – ice cream making

Lauren and Justin – a presentation about North Carolina featuring old-timey dancing

The Arab students – a Jordanian wedding and a lively dabka session

Itai and Hadas – a quick Japanese language and origami lesson

Julie and Timna – though in different countries, they’re both guides and found out that the “mama shark” song is transnational

An assortment of amazing dishes prepared by different people

We had a ton of fun, and the humanity in all of us came out really strongly. It is a horrible shame that the political situation in the country causes the victimization of everyone involved – the soldiers who the day before were laughing and joking become hard and aggressive, largely out of fear, not hate, and the Palestinians who the night before were celebrating with their families and dancing dabka become stubborn and angry for the same reasons. If only everyone could experience the kind of connection that something like our culture night generates, feel the kindness and humanity that exists under the uniform or the keffiyah, maybe we could begin to heal.

As Passover approaches, a time of renewal, my wish is for those little moments of kindness to blossom and multiply exponentially, to light the way to a better future.

I know, I know. How Naïve. But we could do worse than to try.

Dual Narratives

2010-03-22T05:08:00.001-04:00

What is a fact? Many people would argue that a fact is a proposition about the world that is completely verifiable as true and is pretty much incontestable. A fact, it seems, should be obviously true. The idea of truth, however, and the kind of verification desired, changes depending on what sort of propositions you want to verify. Is the theory of Gravity true? What about the statements on the UN's declaration of human rights? There seems to be two kinds of facts: "brute" facts, things like "the Dead Sea is disappearing at a rate of about 1 meter per year" and social facts, things like "the depletion of the Dead Sea is a bad thing." One is objective, the other is about values.

When it comes to history things might at first seem easier. You can verify that Napoleon was crowned emperor of France on X date, or that the first printing press came into being some 400 years earlier. So when Israelis and Palestinians come up with such different histories about how the current situation came to be, you'd think it would be easy to just check the facts and tell the story like it "really" happened. Last PELS, however, we got a taste of how difficult this is. Two people from the Peace Research Institute of the Middle East came in and told us about their project, essentially a way to expose schoolchildren to the narrative of the other side:

This project of the Peace Research Institute in the Middle East (PRIME) focuses on teachers and schools as the critical force over the long term for changing deeply entrenched and increasingly polarized attitudes on both sides of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict. The goal of the project is to "disarm" the teaching of Middle East history in Israeli and Palestinian classrooms.
Specifically, teams of Palestinian and Israeli teachers and historians will develop parallel historical narratives of the Israeli and Palestinian communities, translate them into Hebrew and Arabic, and test their use together in both Palestinian and Israeli classrooms. Unlike other projects that are limited to revising existing Israeli and Palestinian texts, the PRIME project aims at engaging teachers on both sides in an entirely new collaborative process for teaching the history of the region.
At this stage in their polarized history there is not enough common ground for Israelis and Palestinians to create a single historical narrative. Rather, the project is designed to expose students in each community to the other's narrative of the same set of events. For the first time, students in each school system (beginning with 15 and 16 year olds) will not only learn what shapes their own community's understanding of historical events, but be required to confront the historical perspectives and contexts that shape the other community's sense of reality.
The project may, at a later stage, develop multiple narratives of events within each community, reflecting the fact that neither the Palestinians nor the Israelis have a monolithic view regarding the history of the region. The goal, in other words, is not necessarily to create a single "bridging" historical narrative that is shared in common by both communities, but to break down stereotypes and build more nuanced understandings by the next generation of citizens of the two states in the region: Israel and the future Palestinian State.

You can find the booklets in pdf form here: http://www.vispo.com/PRIME/

During the session we got a good sense of how difficult it was to reach a consensus on such touchy issues. To give just one example, when talking about the 1948 war, both sides described their own fighters as soldiers and the other side's fighters as "gangs" (i.e. the Arab gangs or the Zionist gangs). The outcome of the project was years in the making, and I think it's pretty damn impressive.

Jerusalem Closures

2010-03-15T15:43:00.001-04:00

On Tuesday, the Israeli Ministry of the Interior authorized 1600 more housing units for an Ultra-Orthodox neighborhood in East Jerusalem. This caused a general uproar, and rightfully so considering that while there may be occasional overtures from the Israeli government about a two state solution with East Jerusalem as the Palestinian capital, there is a lot going on on the ground that's starting to make that a vanishing proposition. Arab East Jerusalemites generally get the short end of the stick in planning decisions, Jewish development being vastly favored. You can read a whole lot more about this issue at the Ir Amim (City of Nations) website. Due to the uproar and a generally tense baseline situation right now, the checkpoints from the West Bank into Israel have been closed. Tensions are rising right now.

And now for me and all the others here at the institute, this is not just something happening far off to faceless people. Three of our Palestinian colleagues and friends returned home for the weekend and are now stuck there, unable to return to school until the closure ends. Sometimes it's incredibly frustrating to be swimming upstream in a river that seems so overpowering.

Nature's Gone Wild!

2010-03-08T15:42:00.000-05:00

Ask most people when Spring arrives, and they'll answer March 21st. This, after all, is the first official day of spring. But most people know that these sorts of dates and demarcations are really artificial means of organizing the world around us into neat packages for easier digestion. Today was a real reminder of that. Just four or five days ago, the weather was still in some sort of strange argument with itself - dust blew this way and that, clouds would cover the sun and threaten rain only to be on their way five minutes later, and the temperature took a few running starts at heating up, only to balk at the last minute. It reminded me a lot of the way that winter blew in here. But over the past few days it's like someone flipped a switch!

(for those not really into science, you can skip this paragraph :-) People familiar with ecological science (or anything to do with systems thinking actually, be it body systems or ecosystems) know that in the last few decades, the concept of non-linear dynamics has gone from a fringe way of thinking to a basic structuring element of most systems theories. It's pretty simple to understand, actually. Linear dynamics is like a straight line on a graph - moving in one direction a specific amount (say, a raise in temperature five degrees), other factors vary proportionally (say, the metabolism of a certain animal increases X amount). Non-linear dynamics introduces exponential and even unpredictable varying into the mix, often with thresholds beyond which the whole system changes. Let's take the temperature change of five degrees. This change might allow an animal to forage for food a little bit longer per day, and vary in a linear way for a while. But increase the temperature one degree more, and you may hit a threshold beyond which, say, a certain hormone is produced at X amount, leading to a cascade of physiological events concluding with the idea in its little head "Hey, that female/male I didn't really think about yesterday is really cute today!" Linear thinking would have assumed, given that temperature affects mating behavior, that a little increment in temperature means a little increment in behavior. But we now know that these sorts of thresholds are everywhere, and that many systems function pretty much the same within a certain set of parameters, but when they hit their thresholds, they can change exceptionally quickly!

That example about the animal wasn't just out of thin air. This is an incredibly hormonal time of year! They don't call it the birds and the bees for nothing. And this is an especially wonderful place to be if you love birds. You can see why on this map:

That's right. For whatever evolutionary or historical reason, a HUGE proportion of bird migration routes in Africa, Asia, and Europe pass right through Eilat and right overhead! So we're seeing some exotic dances from some exotic birds.

Now, being large animals ourselves, we tend to have a normative idea of sexual behavior that we wouldn't really thinking of applying to any other area of life. But with a little harmless anthropomorphizing, we could, without being too far off, say that the trees, shrubs, and herbaceous plants are getting pretty frisky as well. And they're pretty shameless about it too, hanging their reproductive organs out in open air for everyone to see, adorning them with all sorts of shapes and colors, perfuming themselves and sending the scent out onto the wind. They're a little kinky too, needing a third party involved in most instances for a successful sexual act.

Anyway, it's still cool enough around here to be somewhat comfortable in the direct sunlight at midday, and for the animals to get out and be rowdy at the same time. Like all things though, its time will come and go, giving way to the oppressive heat that drives everyone inside and underground between sunrise and sunset. I'm enjoying it while it lasts.

The Sabbath Queen Descending

2010-03-05T09:19:00.001-05:00

It's a warm, dusty blustery Friday afternoon, and I've got a challah on the go in the kitchen. We're into that lovely time of year where the days are getting longer, the trees are starting to blossom, and the little critters are starting to pop up all over. Somebody has turned on the heating system, but it's just getting warmed up. Nonetheless, you can feel the latent power of the Arava sun, and its inexorable progress towards adventure-movie desert heat. But for now, we can comfortably sit out on the lawn in our shorts and tee-shirts under the noonday sun, chat and play music, and feel the cool grass under our feet.
Getting back into the swing of school wasn't so hard, and I'm really enjoying the new project. From Monday to Thursday there was a conference put on by the students at Ben Gurion University Sde Boker campus, where I'll be next year, on mathematical modeling in the social sciences. For those of you who read the word "mathematical" and felt a pang of anxiety, I'll give you the abstract of the keynote speaker, Peter Turchin, a fairly famous mathematical ecologist who has worked for many years on population dynamics in natural ecosystems:

Most historians and many philosophers believe that a science of history is impossible because history is too complex and historical processes are too different from physical or biological ones. Unlike molecules, for example, people have free wills. I will argue that, on the contrary, it is possible to employ regular scientific approaches in history. Certainly we can study large-scale dynamical processes in history, those that involve large collectives of people and unfold on the time scale of decades and centuries. We can build mathematical models for these processes and they yield novel insights. In some cases they show that ‘predictions’ obtained by informal methods using verbal reasoning can lead us astray.
Even more importantly, it is possible to test model predictions with historical data. With just a little creativity we can obtain quantitative time-series data on a wide variety of economic, social, and political aspects of historical systems. Furthermore, experience so far suggests that history is not simply a “mess,” “one damn thing after another.” There are strong patterns in time-series data. These recurring empirical regularities hint at the operation of some kind of laws of history.

Note the last phrase, the emphasis being mine. Laws of History! The words that Turchin actually used in his lectures were something like 'History is one of the last great frontiers to be conquered by mathematical approaches. Historians are incredibly resistant to mathematical models and quantitative analysis, and I don't know why. I ask them, do you want good models [based on differential equations] or bad models [based on qualitative verbal assumptions]? Some of them want bad models, and some of them don't believe history should even include models, since it's just "one damn thing after another"'
Now, other than being immediately reminded of science fiction author Isaac Asimov's book Foundation, in which "psychohistory" founder Hari Seldon actually completes the project that Turchin sets out to do, my first thought was, yeah, he's going to conquer history like Hitler conquered Russia. It's not like this project hasn't ever been tried before. But the pendulum swings back there occasionally, and each time they say: "this time it will be different". There were some interesting ideas presented, such as a model for how religions spread through societies, using similar models to those of epidemiology (Richard Dawkins would just LOVE that the same mathematical tools that model deadly diseases can be used to model the spread of religions), and using some population dynamics models to try to settle differing accounts of population counts in historical records. So there is something to quantitative tools. But I don't see History becoming a "Science" any time soon - sit in class, learn the basic laws of the rise and fall of civilizations, work on famous case studies, and bring a calculator to the exam. Maybe I'm wrong.
Anyways, I won't bore you with any more details from the conference.

The other great thing that's been going on for the last few days has been a regional cadurregel (football) tournament held on Ketura, with teams coming in from all the Kibbutzim in the area. Both Ketura and the Machon had teams, and it has been really fun to train every day and actually get to play some fairly intense games. Not having played organized soccer since kindergarten (and being North American's generally not in my favor - baseball anyone?....no?), I'm generally a bit lost on the field, but with the help of some decent players we put on a good show and had a ton of fun.
We haven't really gotten much into the PELS stuff yet, so nothing but nice people and good times to report on yet, but this coming week is a history seminar, focusing on 1948, so there should be some interesting discussions. Also, later this year, around April 20th, there will be a combined Israeli independence day and Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe, what 1948 is known as in the Arab world) day. So fasten your seat belts.

Purim!!!!!

2010-02-27T10:01:00.001-05:00

              Much has changed since my last post, and it may surprise many to know that I am now back on Ketura, and after all of the back and forth balancing act, I decided to head back to re-insert myself where I left off, coming back to the Machon with all the others after our shared semester break. Then again, it may not surprise many people who have had more personal interactions with me thus far in my Israel journey – on the blog I have tried to put my public face forward and give an insight into the wonderful things that have been going on, and thus have tried to make it more a personal writing project than a personal diary, and keep the messiness off the page. I’ll only allude to it now, as a supplication to the audience for patience and understanding as I half stumble my way through, and to for this moment accept another change of plans at face value. I finished up with SACH and said goodbye to the kids, which was quite heartbreaking. They all came out with me to wait for the taxi, and while we waited I made the mistake of putting one of them up on my shoulders. The taxi waited for an extra five minutes while each little one got their fair turn running around 8 feet off the ground.
                  Back to the Machon, I’ve also changed projects and supervisors, and will now be working on issues of environmental and public health in the region. Should be very, very interesting! More on the specifics as it progresses. That out of the way…

PURIM!!!!!

Yes, Purim is here in Israel, the Carnival of Jewish holidays during which it is a virtual commandment to inebriate yourself to the point where you don’t know who you are, where you are, or what is right and wrong. This commandment is paralleled by many shifting meanings and identities throughout the Megilla, the book that contains the story of Purim, which supposedly happened around the middle of the first Millennium BC in Persia. It’s definitely of the Jewish “they tried to kill us, we won, let’s eat” holiday archetype, only it’s a little more like “they tried to kill us, we won, let’s dress up, get Schwasted and dance all night.” In Israel Purim is kind of like Halloween and Carnival rolled into one, and they take it very, very seriously. And I’m not one to argue.
               At the Machon, I’ve been attempting to step up my theatre initiatives. Last semester’s drama club met a couple of times, and it was a fun break from studying, but I want to expand the breadth of it to include some work during the Peace Building and Environmental Leadership activities, and to potentially even put together a little theatrical presentation at the end of the semester. We’ve started out strong, putting on an audience participation-based storytelling/improv show of the Purim story, including many classic improv games, and hopefully we’ll get into the swing of it this semester.
               And finally, rain down here in the Arava, by all accounts quite rare, has become old news, with another big storm coming in the past couple of days, causing flooding and power outages. My theory is that, just like winter rolled in on the physical winds of change, pretty soon we’ll be back splashing in the pool and panting like dogs in the noonday sun. Here’s hoping.
   And finally finally, shout out to the Canadian Olympic team!!! What's that? More Gold Medals than any other country thus far? Boo Yah!

In the SACH house

2010-02-14T10:40:00.002-05:00

Here's a little thing I wrote for the SACH blog, and when it's up I'll link to it from here:

It has been a beautiful weekend here in Azor, with the sun shining and spring showing its face in the bright pink flowers on the trees lining our backyard. Thus, a lot of our activities have consisted of playing outside, riding around on toy cars, in strollers, and even on shoulders. Epifania in particular has continued her campaign to spend as much time on volunteer shoulders as humanly possible, greeting whoever she comes across with a stern tug, a smile, and a gesture to her own shoulders. Woodley, Edmar, and Clarence continue to be little packets of 5-6 year old boy-energy, but I’m happy to say have begun to master the art of taking turns without too much trouble. Making orders for different activities now actually seems to be an activity in and of itself for the kids. Khariat and Azmina, the two girls from Zanzibar, 6 and 3, often take charge of this activity, possibly forecasting future careers in leadership positions. Inside, there have been arts and crafts of all sorts, from clay to coloring and making masks, and the children have just discovered dominoes (though somewhat lacking in the patience to set up anything too elaborate before the urge to knock it down overwhelms their sense of the greater satisfaction of creating a larger set-up). The most patience perhaps belongs to Adriana and Rosanna, but unfortunately it’s hard to keep a precarious domino course set up with the likes of Clarence, Woodley, and Azmina zooming around the room. On Saturday we received a visit from the ambassadors from Angola, lugging a present as big as the kids for each one of them. Greg and I helped carry it all into the house, and watched as the kids jumped for joy at their take. It was a very nice visit from some warm and generous people.
This morning I went to visit the hospital, and got to visit Brian, Ancelmo, and Kinsey, our post-surgery boys, as well as the many Arab mothers and children at the Hospital. Brian is up and moving around, chatting and smiling like his old self, while Ancelmo and Kinsley are looking better all the time. Kinsley was feeling up for some high fives, and Ancelmo was drawing some beautiful pictures. I taught Ancelmo tic-tac-toe, and by the end of a few games he was cat’s gaming me every time. About noon, Simonne arrived with Amelia, who’s scheduled for her surgery tomorrow and is looking bright as usual. I doubt it will be long before she’s back at the house and playing again. I got to spend a little time with the Arab mothers and their children, who tend to be younger since their conditions are detected earlier. Some are from the West Bank, some from Gaza, and some from Iraq. Before I came to Israel I learned the Arabic alphabet, how to read and write, and how to say a few things, and so I entertained a few of the Gazan mothers by stumbling through reading and writing all our names in Arabic and trying to communicate through our mish-mash of three languages. The ultimate reason for our visit was to get a check up for our youngest in-house child, Lilliana, who is under two, and while we waited she was the darling of the room, laughing and playing with her little balloon, drawing all the visitors to her with her tiny charm.
Now I’m back at the house and the kids are fast asleep.
We’ve got a great afternoon planned, including a visit from some journalists, but for now I’m just enjoying a quick tea and a rest before the fun starts up again.

Arava Students, old and new

2010-02-12T16:45:00.000-05:00

As I write this I am sitting in the dingy little Eilat bus station, waiting for the night bus to take me back to Tel Aviv for work in the SACH house at 9. It slipped my mind (once again) that Thursday night in Israel is really the first night of the weekend and since all public transport stops at around 3 pm tomorrow, this night bus will probably be packed and I haven’t yet purchased a ticket. No problem though, the Egged lines will always let you on, you just may be lying in the aisle using your backpack as a pillow (note: I did end up getting a seat, and slept like a baby all the way to Tel Aviv :-).

What am I doing in Eilat at midnight, you ask? Returning from the 4^th annual Arava Alumni Peace and Environment Network (AAPEN) conference, that’s what! The conference was held in Aqaba, Jordan, and so once again I made an all too brief pop-over into the Hashemite Kingdom, riding down from Tel Aviv with a good many friends from last semester and an assortment of alumni from the last 12 years of the Machon. As we stopped in Sde Boqer and then Ketura, we picked up even more current and former students, and by the time we got to the border the bus was abuzz with excited chatter as old friends re-united and new friends hit it off. Luckily, we pulled into the border just ahead of a busload of Brazilians, and got through it in just over an hour. We were picked up by a new bus on the other side and driven to the Days Inn Aqaba, which really could have been a Days Inn anywhere, only they served Hummus, Foul, and Labaneh with dinner. Waiting for us at the hotel were many of the Palestinian and Jordanian students, past and present, who made it down for the conference. Yesterday night there was a brief introduction to the meeting schedule and then we were turned loose into the city, some finding coffee shops, some beaches and some liquor stores (yes, alcohol is sold in Aqaba, likely for the same reason that IDF shirts are sold in the Arab quarter of Old Jerusalem- rhymes with honey).

The next morning, after a slightly groggy breakfast, we went down to the conference room and were woken up by a stirring speech on environmental leadership from Alon Tal, famous Israeli environmental lawyer and activist, and also co-founder of the Machon Arava. Following that was a talk from Alan Weismann, author of the book The World Without Us, which essentially describes what would happen to global ecosystems if humans were to all suddenly disappear. This thought experiment led to a brief foray into the always touchy topic of population control, and how it can ethically be achieved without coercion, unequal treatment, and with cultural sensitivity. This, incidentally, is what Weismann’s next book will be about.

Then we got down to business. You see, it turns out that at a time when NGOs all over the world are suffering from the general economic downturn, the Machon is thriving. With more students than ever before, more donors than ever before and maybe more projects germinating than it is sane to handle, the Institute is looking to strengthen its alumni network as well, and is looking to get a large grant for a large transboundary project for the near future. So we sat down and brainstormed all sorts of potential projects, from environmental education to shared nature reserves to major infrastructure projects to cultural and artistic gatherings. One of the major issues with doing transboundary projects with Israelis, Jordanians, and Palestinians, is travel. Since Palestinians must have permits to travel to Israel, and these permits take a whole lot of concerted effort to obtain (anyone who’s dealt with the Israeli Ministry of the interior will know that this institution is stubborn and nasty at the best of times, to even the most upstanding of Israeli citizens and benign foreigners). On top of that, it is illegal for Israelis to travel to most places in the West Bank.

Ilana Meallem, that wonderful alumni I posted about earlier, has proposed a potential solution, which apparently has been waiting to crystallize in the peace and environment community for quite some time – basically a retreat in a neutral territory, one that Israelis can go to and for which Palestinians and Jordanians don’t need permits. This kind of location apparently exists somewhere along the Dead Sea, and the plan is to turn it into a kind of Eco-Village and peace centre. I hope I can be around to see it become a reality. After this we heard about some projects going on in the region, the most interesting of which is the Biodigester project, a health and environment initiative aiming to help poor Palestinian and Bedouin communities. Most of these people have large herds of goats and flocks of sheep, their main source of income, but from these herds and flocks comes quite a bit of waste, much of which is burned for fuel or essentially left around, both of which are public health hazards and waste problems. With a Biodigester, a low-tech, low cost technology, the manure can be digested anaerobically to form methane gas, a clean burning fuel for cooking and heating, and the remainder of the waste, after minimal treatment, can be used as fertilizer. This solution is good for the health and sustainability of these communities.

I unfortunately had to cut out from the conference after dinner and before the movie, since the border closes at 8 pm and I needed to be back to Azor for 9 tomorrow morning, having gotten only two days off from Save a Child’s Heart to go. I’m really looking forward to being back though, I’m becoming quite fond of the children currently in the house. More about this in the next couple days…

Tubishvat

2010-01-31T12:25:00.002-05:00

Yesterday was the Jewish holiday of Tubishvat, known as the holiday of the trees. As a kid in Hebrew school back when I was just a wee one, I distinctly remember collecting money to plant trees in Israel. About a week ago when I was driving from Jerusalem to Tel Aviv, I saw the full impact of all of that effort. Grown from nearly nothing at the time (though most of the ‘desolate’ Near East was actually forested and green before ancient people cut down the forests), the hills between the two cities are green once again. Coming up from the Arava, it’s nice to drink in all that green like a cool glass of water.

It never really struck me as strange until this year that the holiday of trees was in the middle of winter, but like so many of the Jewish holidays, this one actually makes sense if you’re in the Southern Levant. Just as we celebrated Sukkot as the last dates were falling off the kibbutz palms, shaking a palm leaf, an etrog, and some myrtle, Tubishvat is happening just as the almond trees all around are in full delicate pink and white bloom. Yes, I apologize once again to those who are buried deep in the white stuff, but spring is coming! It has actually been raining quite a bit both here in Tel Aviv where I’m currently stationed, and in Jerusalem where I was last week. And January showers bring February flowers! Hmmm…..a bit different rhythm, but I like it.

So, you might be wondering what I’ve been up to. Last Tuesday, the 19^th of January, I needed to move my some of my stuff up to the Save a Child’s Heart (SACH) house in Holon, where I’ll be staying starting on the 4^th of Feb. Now, since my plan was originally to stay for two years, I got my parents to bring a couple of instruments when they came in October – so on top of my couple of bags, I also had my awesome hand-made Banjo (shout out to Jed!), and my/my dad’s old Gibson guitar. What to do! So my good friend Adi and I rented a car in Eilat and drove our stuff, as well as an ailing comrade, up to Jerusalem. Our car was a little Mazda 2, and the driver was myself. It’s a beautiful drive, with the first half through the desert and the second half with the Dead Sea and Jordan flanking you to the right. Those of you who know Israel well will know that this trip down the Arava road is probably the most dangerous thing I will have done in my stay in Israel, vastly more dangerous than visiting Ramallah or Bethlehem. Getting to Jerusalem, I was still at the helm, and Adi, who knew the city, was my navigator. I can tell you this: Jerusalem is a confusing city to drive in, especially if you’re from a nice grid like Toronto. Let’s say you want to end up about 1 kilometer north-east. The best route will probably take you southwest, curve around gradually for 500 meters, cut back across the road you were originally on, and then go through a tunnel. It took about three days of walking with a map in hand to finally get a real sense of the layout.

After moving Adi into Hebrew University, where he’ll be spending this semester, we drove across to Tel Aviv to move one of my bags into the SACH house, and spent the day in Tel Aviv, which is a stark contrast to Jerusalem. The ‘old’ port dates back to the 1930s! To put that into perspective, the Old City of Jerusalem dates back presumably to the 9^th century BC (I’d write BCE but it’s really still counting from Jesus isn’t it? And BP (before present) is just a little confusing), making it roughly 50 times older. If Jerusalem is the holy city, giving you the feeling of the ancientness of the civilization here, Tel Aviv is the modern metropolis, reminding you that Israel is a modern state indeed, replete with all the secular pleasures and debaucheries of the modern western society. Jerusalem is full of American Birthright kids, yeshiva students, and older ex-pats playing Israeli on the one hand, and Haredi orthodox Jews walking around with their eastern European garb, living off the state, and multiplying like rabbits on the other (there’s plenty in between though, these groups are just the most visible). That, mixed with the constant tension of the conflict and the Green Line essentially surrounding a swelling city on three sides makes for a pretty intense experience. In comparison, Tel Aviv is almost like a normal city, only the people are rude like Parisians and speak Hebrew. Both are a welcome change from the tiny town atmosphere of the Kibbutz. What a pleasure to go into a coffee shop and not know anyone!

That being said, it was wonderful to return to the Kibbutz for the final party at the Arava Institute, and attend the last PELS session the next day. There’s nothing like a final ceremony full of love, tears, and speeches of admiration to make one question one’s decision to leave a place. In fact, my decision to leave didn’t exactly come all at once, but was the product of many swings back and forth, earning me tongue-in-cheek award of “Best Decision Maker” for the “most impressive balancing act” awarded by “cirque de soleil sans frontiers” at the closing ceremony, a multi-level reference to both my characteristic indecision and my now well-practiced ability of slack-line walking. But, with no regrets, I’m taking all the incredible memories and friendships with me now into the future, and I’m going to be applying what I’ve learned for the rest of my life. I’m trying to wipe the word mistake from my vocabulary. After a final round of capoeira and a last soccer game in the field, one more trip to the kibbutz convenience store and one more meal at the cafeteria, one more check in the communal laundry to make sure that there were no clothes in my spot a month after I dropped them off and about 500 hugs later, half of us hopped on the bus up to Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, some for a month off before returning and many to leave the institute entirely. I have a feeling I’ll be back someday, in some capacity.

And now I find myself in Tel Aviv again, staying with my friend Itai and taking advantage of the debaucherous big city with some Arava comrades, going to a wonderfully too serious for its own good Indie show on Friday night, and to a fantastic Turkish-modern mash-up show (think twelve bar blues and Britney Spears’ Toxic on an Oud, a Q’noun, and Turkish Drums) at a classy bar last night followed by a trip to a gay bar with the best DJ I’ve heard since I got to Israel. Oh yeah, and finishing up the rest of my work from the Institute.

And one more thing about Tubishvat. The best time to plant a tree is yesterday. For serious. Enjoy this article by Rabbi Michael, one of the Arava Faculty.

Flood!

2010-01-20T16:42:00.000-05:00

Thanks to Itai for the Pictures!

This is at about 9 in the morning, the sun had still not come out and a little drizzle was in the air. In the background you can see Kibbutz Grofit with a wispy cloud hanging just over it. In the picture is Itai and me bathroommates for life.

This Acacia picked a good spot to live!

It was too late, however, for this acacia.

Here we find a snake seeking cover from the rain under a rock. I don't think he particularly wanted company.

The official definition that you hear most times of "wadi" is "dry river bed." So I guess these were, for a brief 24 hour period, not wadis but rivers.

Here we find a waterfall!

And up close.

We climbed up a crevice in the rock and shimmied to the top of the waterfall. By this point the sun had come up and the people below were rejoicing. For those of you in cold climates. Think about the first snowfall of the year and how excited everyone gets. Now think about if you hadn't had snow in 25 YEARS! Anyone who had kids took their children out to see the flood. It's a once-a-generation sort of thing.

Itai in a rock pool. nuts.

If you want to read more about it, my friend Adi has a post at his wonderful blog: http://adventureadi.blogspot.com/

Flood of the century (so far)

2010-01-17T18:56:00.000-05:00

Tonight it is supposed to rain. A lot. By tomorrow morning there may very well be waterfalls in the wadis up in the hills, and deep rock pools where we can swim. I remember one time in Colorado skiing with my family, sitting in the hot tub and looking at the snow all around, being really struck by the cognitive dissonance. Maybe tomorrow as I look out from a deep rock pool and see the as yet lifeless landscape, I'll feel the same way. My camera's still out of commission, but there should be some group pictures I can nick from somewhere. Hopefully I can share it with all of you.

Last Day of Classes

2010-01-14T19:33:00.000-05:00

So, today was my last day of classes; it was a full, 8 hour day at that! I finished with 3 hours of Environmental Anthropology in the morning and 5 hours of Eco-Health in the afternoon. Nadav Davidovitch, our professor for Eco-health, is a public health physician and researcher at BGU, and he managed to sneak in a short apropos lecture about natural disasters and public health missions into the 5 hour session, which was mostly us presenting and discussing our rough papers. In fact, he will likely be heading to Haiti with the Israeli delegation in the next couple of days, and has been helping to prepare them since yesterday morning. My friend Adi and I are convinced that he's a superhero in disguise.

Even though I know that leaving after this term is the right thing for me, the prospect of leaving this place and all of the wonderful friends that I have made here is a bit painful. I know I will be in Israel for another few months and will get to visit and spend a little time with them, but the reality of leaving the kibbutz is quite rapidly approaching. I move my stuff to Holon, where I will be working for Save a Child's Heart, on Tuesday! After 4 months in a place, not matter where, it kind of feels like home and I guess it always will to a certain extent. I will try to, in the next couple weeks, catch all you readers up on the goings on of the last little while and try to sum up this whole experience somehow.

And then it will be on to new adventures...

Teaching in Aqaba part 2

2010-01-09T15:02:00.000-05:00

So, when we left our fearless hero he was just about to commence teaching in a high school all day in Aqaba, Jordan...

So, the first class I was only thrown into for about 25 minutes, and Khalid told me just to talk with the kids, to engage with them and practice their English. When I asked him what would be a good activity or exercise to go with, he said, you know, just talk with them. Right. As you can imagine, walking into a classroom of 25-30 tenth grade students in a foreign country with no real plan leads to a slightly absurd situation. I think the only thing that really saved me was their initial fascination with me being from North America - they asked me some questions about it and I told them a couple stories about canoe trips and train trips and how long it takes to get from one side to the other. Then I started asking them some questions: What do you like to do? What are your favorite movies? What kind of stuff are you learning now? The time passed and the conversation was pretty consistent, but it was pretty obvious that I didn't have any sort of plan and there was some ruckus and what teacher's call "classroom management issues". But the time passed nonetheless. After the class (and all the ones that followed) the students filed out and each one personally thanked me and called me "sir". If only Canadian high school students were so respectful.

Then came the real class, the one I had actually prepared for. About 30 kids packed into a classroom just big enough to fit all of them. Luckily it's winter and so it wasn't sweltering. With 30 kids in the room in June I don't think I would have been able to breathe! And....it actually went pretty well! The kids got into it, especially when I was speaking about water scarcity, which even the high school kids know its a huge issue. They deal with it every day. At one point I broke them up into little groups and had them debating whether or not a water diversion project should be implemented - they were supposed to be different people involved: the farmers who would get the water, the animals whose water source would be dried up...it was a little chaotic and I overestimated their reading ability, but I'd say about 50 percent really got it. One lesson learned: Know your Class!

The rest of the day went pretty smoothly and we even had nice little break for sandwiches and tea. After seeing me teach a few classes, Khalid insisted that I come and teach for them starting in September. They were looking for Biology teachers, and especially ones that spoke English. I would like to think it was due to my outstanding teaching abilities, but my guess is that he makes that offer to any Anglophone to walk in the door.

I left at the end of the day, shared a cab with one of the other teacher (who we dropped off at her place before heading to the border), crossed back over, paying my 5 Jordanian Dinar to get back into Israel, and headed back up to the Institute. What a whirlwind of an experience!

Teaching in Aqaba part 1 (of 2, really :-)

2010-01-05T17:36:00.000-05:00

Tuesday morning, 3:30 am. My alarm goes off, and though my first instinct is to promptly smack the snooze button and close all avenues of escape for the warm air sandwiched between my body and my blankets, it hits me suddenly what I'm going to be doing today. Having packed up everything I needed in the evening, I jump out of bed, jump into an unsatisfactorily lukewarm shower (since the showers are solar heated, mid-day is by far the best), get into my somewhat nicer clothes for teaching, and run out to the Arava highway just outside the kibbutz to catch the night bus from Tel Aviv as it barrels down the straight path at 150 kilometers an hour. The bus I'm catching actually left Tel Aviv at midnight and I'm catching this one since the first morning bus to come by in the Eilat direction wouldn't get me to the school remotely near on time for my 8 o'clock lesson We pull into Eilat, and it is nearly 5 am. This is what Eilat looks like at 5 am. We're looking here over the Jordan mountains, in the direction I'm headed:

The border doesn't open for another hour and a half, so I've got a little time to kill. I find myself a 24 hour cafe/convenience store, buy some bland crisps and a pack of humus, and go over the lesson plan I've prepared. Hanan, the professor in environmental education who set me up with this gig, assured me that I would be teaching 15 +, and that "their English is better than most of the Israelis". As I go over the lesson plan, a pretty sophisticated discussion of humans and their relationships with the natural world, I start to get a little panicky. What if they can't understand a word I'm saying? What if they don't give a rat's ass?

Oh well, I'll probably never see them again.

At about 6:20 I grab a cab to the border to beat out the big tour buses which lumber through carrying hundreds of eager tourists in and out of Jordan for the day. I covered crossing the border in a previous post, and now I know exactly where to go and what to do. Only last time I had a cab there waiting for me and this time I'm planning to just be resourceful and figure out a way. After all, I'll have about an hour to get there. At the other side of the gate I see what looks vaguely like a couple of cabs with some somewhat sketchy looking drivers hanging out smoking. I ask one of them how much it would be to take me to the rosary sisters school. After conversing in rapid Arabic for about 20 seconds, one of them smiles a big, friendly smile and says:

"10 dinars for the hostel."

"Sorry, but I'm looking for the rosary sisters school"

more conversing

"8 dinars for the hostel"

"no, not a hostel, a school"

"what school?"

"the rosary sisters school. Do you know where that is?"

"Sure, yes, yes. I take you downtown and then someone take you to the school"

"Is the school downtown?"

"I take you downtown"

It was about this time I heard "pssssssst" from behind me. The exit guard was beckoning for me to come over. He led me to a friend of his, an oddly plain-clothed man, and the two spoke quickly in Arabic just like the other two men had done.

"I'll take you to the school"

"The rosary sisters school?"

"yes, of course"

"you know where it is?"

"yes."

"how much?"

"don't worry about it my friend, no need to worry. I'll get you there"

This guy was going to take me for free! This seems to happen in Jordan quite frequently. When I went to Egypt with my dad, everyone offered you a gift, only to say at the end "oh, well how about a little bit in exchange, you know, for a friend who gave you such a gift." But this guy just drove me there. We had a nice ride and conversation about our families, where I'm from, what we're both doing, and a firm handshake and smile, then he dropped me off. Amazing.

And this is what I saw in front of me:

Pretty snazzy, hey? So I walked onto the premises and into the building, not really know what to expect. Inside it was quite nice, with white stone floors, a black reception desk and simple decor. One thing though, there was no one at the desk. It was about 7:15. I stood around for about ten minutes, and every now and then someone would pass by on their way through to something, and we would exchange a nice good morning smile and a SabaH il-Kheer (good morning in Arabic). But I still had no idea what to do. I decided to ask the next person to walk by if they would show me where Khalid was.

"Khalid?"

"ahhh...yeah Khalid Ali"

"who's that?"

"Khalid.....uh...Ali?"

"hmmmm..."

"Khalid?"

"Ahhhh, KHAlid! Not in yet. I'll take you to the sister. The principle."

So I walked wearily down the hall after this man and entered a little office smelling sweetly of Arabic coffee, rich with cardamom. At the desk was a tiny middle aged woman with a hijab (which, by the way, is the religious head covering of traditional Arab Christians as well as Muslims). We sit down and she offers me some coffee, the strongest I've ever had, in the smallest cup I've ever held.

"So, you are here to teach. How long will you be here for?"

"Just for the day"

"Not for longer? We love having Americans come to teach for us. It helps our students so much with their English. Where are you from?"

I remembered that Hana has cautioned me to not mention Israel if I didn't have to. Apparently the sister and he had a good relationship until the Gaza war, and so this operation was a little under the radar, just between Hanan and Khalid.

"Canada"

"ah, Canada! It's beautiful, but it's very cold, is it not?"

"yeah...so, do you know where Khalid is?"

"Oh, you are teaching for Khalid's class. Funny, he didn't mention anything about it to me. He' will be here shortly"

Yes...funny.

"Oh, that's odd."

So we chatted away until Khalid showed up, and then he led me up into his office. He basically told me that he didn't really care what I taught, and he just really wanted me to speak English with the kids, ask them questions, talk to them and get them into conversations. I told him what my plan was and he frowned a little:

"hmmm....that is pretty complicated. Many of the students don't have that good English. Maybe you should just speak with them about whatever you'd like, but not so complicated"

Great. The premise of this project is teaching environmental education. I make up my mind to tough it out through my lesson plan and wing it out of my repertoire of Green Stuff if things start to head south.

"oh, and can you stay for a few lessons? I have you filling in for teachers for most of the periods."

What could I say. Why not?

Happy New Year!

2010-01-01T10:42:00.002-05:00

Last night was a wonderful new years eve. It was a full moon, and so we went out into the Negev Highlands for a five hour hike back to the Kibbutz under the brilliant silver light. My camera isn't functioning properly, so unfortunately I have no pictures to post, but I can paint you one: Imagine being surrounded by the jagged edges and exposed body of the desert landscape, interspersed with dunes of sand so soft and fine that it feels like powdery snow. Rabbi Michael, who came with us on the hike, made the comment that so many visionaries find their visions out in the desert because the landscape is totally exposed, and in turn you expose your own soul. But the most amazing vision for me was of the moon shadows playing on the landscape. The moon was so bright that the interplay of the clouds and the moon made shifting silver ephemeral shapes crawling across the dunes. And to think I could have been stuck inside watching the New Years shows in TV! We climbed down from the plateau of the highlands into the Arava Valley along one of the supposed paths that the ancient Israelites used on their 40 year wanderings, and made it back to the Kibbutz by around 11:30. Following this fun spiritual journey, we all piled into the already crowded Kibbutz pub to dance to the top 40 and bring in the new year! But I have to say, coming in from the desert made the pub experience all the better in its juxtaposition.

So, there is something that I must tell those of you who have been reading this blog in the expectation of two full years of stories and thoughts. I have, for various reasons, decided that the pursuit of a masters degree through this program is not where I want to be headed. Retracing my steps through my thought process, I realized that it was really the experience of the place, and not necessarily the degree, that I really wanted, but thought that I "might as well" go for the degree if I was going to be here anyway. So, though it may seem odd given the enthusiasm I've displayed, I will only be staying at the Arava Institute for one term, and will be leaving on the 29th of this month. I've had some unbelievable experiences here, and hope to continue writing about them through reflections on this blog. I will also be staying in Israel for a few months after I leave the Institute to volunteer and travel, and will write about those experience too. I'm glad I chose a flexible blog title! Where I go from here I'm not entirely sure. I have some ideas, probably too many, and I think that some time experimenting with them and trying on some different hats will help me figure myself out. After all, I've been in school writing papers and doing tests every year since I was six (well, maybe the papers started after that, but you get the idea).

Anyways, Happy New Years everybody! May it bring us all a little more joy and wisdom.

As the New Year Approaches

2009-12-29T14:54:00.000-05:00

Yikes! My last post was on December 12th! A ton has been going on here, and I've been a little caught up to report on it. Just to give you a little taste, for my environmental education class I made a trip over to Aqaba one chilly morning to teach a high school class about sustainability. I ended up being cajoled into staying all day and mostly chatting with the students, since they really just wanted an English speaker to come in and talk to them. In the end, they offered me a job teaching Biology starting in September! We had another intense trip over Christmas, this time to Jerusalem. The trip included Gilo, a "settlement" within the green line, Efrat, a real contested settlement (where we spoke with Rabbi Riskin, a leader in the settlement community), a talk with Ir Amim, an Israeli social justice watchdog, including a trip through Arab East Jerusalem, and finally a trip into a refugee camp in the area. Needless to say, tensions were a little high and the practice of "compassionate listening we've been working so hard on broke down not a few times. This was all followed by a well-deserved weekend doing whatever we liked in Jerusalem, and many of us spent Christmas in Bethlehem (imagine!). Right now I'm working on some projects, but I'll fill in the details as much as I can soon!

An Angelic Arava Alumnus

2009-12-12T18:48:00.001-05:00

Here is a recent article in the Jerusalem Post about Ilana Meallem, maybe the most charismatic and positive person I've ever met. She graduated from the institute a couple years ago after doing some award-winning research on Bedouin health issues. She now does an insane amount of work on peace-building and environmental activism - all from her home/peace van. Her friends call her a techno-Bedouin. It's inspiring to me that such a person exists, and a bonus that I've met her and am in the same program she went through.

RAIN!!!

2009-12-10T12:48:00.000-05:00

That's right, it rained! No dust in the air, the ground soaking wet, and a rainbow to boot! It smelled so good around here. But wouldn't you know it, 48 hours later and it's like it never happened.

Arna's Children

2009-12-08T17:57:00.000-05:00

The gloves really came off tonight. First we had our environmental leadership seminar, where we watched a short movie about direct, non-violent action against the felling of old growth forests of Australia - essentially holing up in trees, lying under bulldozers, holding satirical dramatic protests in the streets. The discussion after this was fairly moderate, mostly centered around the ethics of civil disobedience to accomplish particular goals.

Then came a voluntary viewing of the film "Arna's Children", which follows the lives of a few Palestinian children from the Jenin refugee camp. All of the children were involved in the project of a woman named Arna, who brought an educational program to the camp involving art and theatre. This part of the movie is truly inspiring, if a little bit disturbing - this woman is incredibly political, but she tries to help these hurt, frustrated, and angry children channel their anger into something beautiful. Even through her efforts though, their art and their theatre often remains centered around the "resistance", and in one scene, following the demolition of one of the youth's house by the IDF, she encourages them to act out what they would do to a soldier if they saw one. Slowly, throughout the movie, you see glimpses of what happens to these children - one becomes a suicide bomber, a few are killed in the fighting during the siege of Jenin. Through conversations with many people in the camp you get a sense of the general attitude of the people - the resistance is ingrained into their very sense of self.

So then we got to talking. It really surprised me, but many of the Palestinian students were very reluctant to denounce the form of resistance demonstrated by the boys later in their life, even the suicide bombings. To be sure, they all said explicitly that they were personally against these attacks, but they also said that they could understand the motivation. For many people, growing up in the culture of martyrdom, this is "the only way" Many of them have lost friends and family members to the conflict, and to them whether or not a death is "collateral" or not, or whether it was intended or not, they feel that resistance is justified, that if the IDF comes with violence that they have a right to respond with violence. The Israelis and Americans of course emphasized the fundamental difference in the ethics of what the IDF does (ie minimizing civilian damage, trying to be as precise as possible) and what a suicide bomber does, but of course things on the ground never are as clear cut as that. All I can say is that for a Canadian boy who's only experience with violence was a playground fight in third grade, I can only superficially understand. The night ended with hugs and crying, and then we stood in a circle and held hands, and reminded ourselves that we're not here to trip over the past, but to try and build a better future.

More on the way!

2009-12-07T11:36:00.000-05:00

Wow, it's been two weeks! Sorry for those coming to the site and leaving disappointed. I do assure you though, more is on the way - midterm season is a bit rough no matter where you are :-).

In the meantime, here are an amusing picture from the old city in Bethlehem:

Negev Trip Part 1

2009-11-24T14:10:00.000-05:00

Ok, I know you’re dying for Bethlehem. But right now we are on the mid-semester trip to the Negev Highlands, and there’s just too much interesting stuff to share! I packed my roots backpack full with clothes, a sleeping bag for a tent night, schoolbooks and laptop, and of course couldn’t go without my banjo. We packed all 50 of us into a bus and drove about 2 hours north and west to Sde Boqer. This area, according to people who travel from Ketura and the Eilat region, is cool and wet. This means it gets up to 100 (count ‘em) millimeters of rain a year, as opposed to the less than 20 in EIlat. It’s also about 700 meters higher, meaning that you really need a good jacket to be out past sunset in November. Getting there bright and early in the morning, first thing we did was head into the wadis for a hike, and surveyed the open landscapes. Looking out over these almost barren limestone and flint hills stretching to the horizon, wadis crisscrossing the open space, ibex relaxing in the paths, you get the impression of boundless space – Israel isn’t a tiny country after all!

Once we got back though, we got some help from our professors in looking more closely. More than half of the land area of Israel is the Negev in the south, and yet only about 9 percent of the population lives there. For the past number of decades, it has been a government priority to settle people (i.e. Jews, more on that later) into these areas, promoting development and pouring a lot of money into the areas. About 80 percent of the Negev is designated military and is used for training purposes, and another 50 percent or so is nature preserve (the math baffles me too, but strangely there’s a ton of overlap) but much of the rest is open for discussion. If you ask different people, you’ll end with many different answers as to what to do with this land. Some people look at the Negev and say “we need this area to stay open and wild, to be there for hiking, eco-tourism, and nature preserves, but not for settlement!” Settlement looks inefficient here, sprawling and poor. Life expectancies, services, and general qualities of life are indeed lower here. Others will say that this is the best place for settlement, open and awaiting a population who will make this area bloom – as desalination technology gets cheaper, water really needn’t be a limiting factor here, and Israelis are incredible technologically and agriculturally. And indeed, the government has over time funded many settlements, some of refugees and immigrant Jews from poorer parts of the world. They have also been leasing land for “homesteads” to Jews who want to make something of the land. One more thing that there has been plenty of in the Negev, since it is such a wide open space, is dumping and heavy industry – things that wouldn’t fly so well near the bigger centers.

There is one more thing that needs to be taken into account in these discussions, and this is the Bedouin populations that make their homes in Israel’s south. Originally semi-nomadic herders who wouldn’t have considered themselves part of any nationality and wandered across borders readily, since 1948 there is a significant Bedouin population that finds itself as Israeli citizens, caught between an old style of life and a new reality of borders and zoning laws. About 10,000 in 1948, this population is now about 160,000. In the south here there are many settlements of Bedouin unrecognized by the Israeli government because they live in areas that are not zoned as residential areas. As such, they receive no services (water, sanitation, garbage collection, electricity). The majority of the Bedouin have moved to areas recognized by the government and receive these services, but often at the sacrifice of much of their lifestyle – they receive a one-time compensation and perhaps a small house, but there are stories of those people then putting their livestock in the house and living outside in a tent – it’s just ingrained culturally. So many of these people persist here, bringing us to the start of our trip. The trip was really masterfully arranged, quite like a mystery story. The subject was Negev development and one by one we met a whole bunch of witnesses to the story, building up a clearer and clearer picture as we went.

Kornmehl Farms – The first visit on our trip was to an artisanal goat cheese farm, one of the 25 homesteads to be granted to people to further the development of the area. It is owned by a very nice Jewish couple, both graduates of agricultural school, who have had a dream from the beginning to open a farm and work with animals. Once they learned their trade they began looking for land near Jerusalem, but to no avail after about three years. The government finally decided to settle them on a little piece of land, about 200 acres, in the Negev, where they can’t really graze their goat herd. They make their living though, buying in feed, making amazing cheese and selling to markets and restaurants, also running their own small restaurant on the farm. The land authority, though, according to them difficult as always, is trying to make them move, and has only renewed their lease on a yearly basis for the past 8 years. So here we have our first in a pattern – everybody is standing in their own place, with their own goals and dreams, dealing with other people, groups, and institutions in a highly contested area.

Yerucham – The next stop on the trip was to a development town south of the farm, home to about 9,500. This town has existed for about 40 years, and has been heavily subsidized by the government as a settling place for many Jews from non-European countries, especially Arab countries. We first heard from a woman named Leah, who is a very famous social activist living in Yerucham. A teacher by trade, she moved to Yerucham with her husband about 30 years ago essentially to give herself to the development of people less fortunate than her. But in her own words, “that’s not how it worked”. She’s a modern orthodox woman, and has made great strides in women’s rights within that community, as well as being a hub of social organization for the community. Her passion for democracy, human rights, and equality were really inspiring, even if her rhetoric was a little strong and old-school leftist. After speaking with her for an hour and a half, we split up and went for dinner at a couple different houses, collectively the “Culinary Queens of Yerucham”. This is one of Leah’s social programs, organizing women in the community to open their houses for groups passing through, sharing both their food and their stories. The woman who’s house I ate at cam from Morocco looking for a better life, not even knowing where in Israel she would end up. Imagine ending up in the middle of the Negev! But in the end she said that she would do it all over again – her six children are all skilled professionals with families and a good life.

Wadi Na’im - We got up the next morning and drove along the power station road to Wadi Na’im, one of the largest unrecognized Bedouin villages at 6,500 people. It is located about five kilometers from Romat Chovav, an industrial park with a an income of multiple billions of dollars that essentially looks like a caricature of “Big Industry”. They make pesticides and plastics, toxins and chemicals of all different uses, also taking in and processing the toxic waste from all over Israel. Also right next door to Wadi Na’im is a massive power plant, and criss-crossing over your head as you walk through the village are many power lines. After taking a look (and a smell) around the place, we were invited to a big tent for tea and a talk with a representative from the community. The stories we heard were pretty heavy – elevated risk for birth defects, respiratory problems in children, cancer, and so on, all as a result of exposure to the environmental hazards around them. We also hear about their struggle with the government for recognition, and to move to a place where they want to go. It’s a very complicated issue – the Bedouin have always been semi-nomadic, meaning that each tribe had its own patch of land, and migrated within than, but kept mostly to this land. Moving to a new settlement in the midst of other tribes and families poses many problems, but the lands that this group thought would be ok to move to were refused by the government, so they struggle on. The spokeman voiced frustration that out of the 25 homesteads granted to people in that development program, only a single one of them was granted to Bedouin – the rest went to Jews.

Ramat Chovav – Leaving Wadi Na’im, we drove right over to the industrial park, where we listened to a presentation from the man in charge of the environmental issues and monitoring surrounding Romat Chovav. He proceeded to describe all of the different industries residing in the park, and what each of them does. He acknowledged that in the past standards have not been as strict as they are now, but he spent most of his time describing how in the past 3 or 4 years the park has done much to control the airborne and waterborne pollution from the plant, monitoring very closely for many different compounds that could potentially cause health effects. The result of all of this effort (and hundreds of millions of dollars) looked like an almost silenced threat. In case after case the monitoring graphs showed levels dropping to nearly zero for dangerous pollutants. After the presentation, and some pretty skeptical questions, they drove us out into the midst of the park, where we got a whiff of what it is like to work there. The smell of Hydrogen Sulfide (NOT a toxin, we were reminded) was so heavy many people had to go back onto the bus. They’re hoping to reduce the smell also to nearly zero by the end of 2010. A bit overwhelmed and confused, we drove to a park for a big pizza lunch

Interlude – Even in two hours off in a lovely little park, this group can’t seem to avoid a little shaking things up. As we ate our pizza, did our yoga and played our music, our attention was drawn to a group of 30 or so female soldiers doing just about the same about 50 meters off. Even the drums were identical. So it occurred to a few of us to try and bring the soldiers, in full uniform, over to our group for a jam session. This threw many of the Palestinian students, some dressed in hijabs or kefiyehs, into a bit of crisis. The soldiers came over and we indeed began to jam, with drums, guitars, flute, violin, harmonicas, etc. But most of the Palestinians walked off, followed closely by some of the Jewish students trying to persuade them to stay. As we jammed, about 20 meters off arguments were raging, in a very surreal scene. The arguments essentially boiled down to two: From the Palestinian side, seeing people in IDF uniforms just makes them into a symbol, something that they can’t deal with in a person-to-person situation. Remember that as Palestinians they are NOT under Israeli law, but under martial law, and someone in uniform can at any time come to their house in the night and arrest them and hold them with no charge for more than a year. Those soldiers weren’t people, but soldiers. We, however, argued that if they had stayed they would have provided those soldiers with a different experience than they likely ever had before – friendly Palestinians laughing and singing with them. Wouldn’t it make it that much harder to be hard and cold in the territories with that experience ringing in your head? Not only that, but it would give the Palestinians an opportunity to open themselves up to the fact that soldiers on top of being soldiers, really ARE people. We’ll be talking about this one for a while to come.
After that we had a long talk about the disparate information we received that morning, and about who to trust and how you can ever know.

Anyways, that’s it for part 1. Stay tuned.

Age of Ahava

2009-11-17T14:42:00.000-05:00

No, not Bethlehem yet. But I just found the piece of paper cleaning up my room and thought you might get a kick out of this. When all the masters students went to the international dinner at Sde Boqer, where we'll be spending our second year, we presented a little skit of what life is like at the Arava Institute. We reinforced the stereotype a wee little bit, but it's not that far off :-)

To the tune of Age of Aquarius:

Age of Ahava

When Mohammad hikes with Ya’ara
And Benjamin reads with Fatima
They both are getting filled with grace
The great grace of Love

This is the dawning of the Age of Ahava
The Age of Ahava
Let's go Ketura!
In the Arava!

Mudbuilding and conservation
Fighting desertification
Ecology without borders
Dialogue instead of mortars
Environmental peace supporters
Make this drought of progress shorter
Ahava! In Arava!

When we learn to have respect for all
Human beings, plant and animal
Then Peace will guide the planet
And Love will fill the world

This is the dawning of the Age of Ahava
The Age of Ahava
Let's go Ketra!
In the Arava!

Grey water and solar panels
Lots of hippies, some wear flannel
Dance the dovka dance the hora
Save the fauna and flora
Let us listen to Al Gora
Or we’ll end up like gamorrah
Ahava! In Ketura!
Ahava! In Ketura!
Ahava!

Let the rain come, Let the flood come in
The flood come in
Let the rain come, Let the flood come in
The flood come in
Let the rain come, Let the flood come in
The flood come in
Let the rain come, Let the flood come in
The flood come in
Let the rain come, Let the flood come in

Importance of Urban Agriculture

2009-11-15T15:43:00.003-05:00

As some funny men used to say, and now for something completely different!

I will definitely be writing about Bethlehem, but it'll take some time and I want it to be good. And in the mean time, here's a little piece I wrote for the Ben Nobleman Orchard site that they didn't end up needing. So why waste a good little bit of writing?

If Jeff Rubin is correct in his recent book “Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller”, then the Ben Nobleman Orchard, currently Toronto’s only community orchard, won’t be so for long. The reason is actually quite simple: the industrialization and globalization of food production of the past fifty years has increased the amount of energy used to produce every calorie of food on your plate. This rise in the energy intensity of our food has occurred in almost every aspect of the food system, from farm to plate; fossil fuels are now the lifeblood of the system that feeds us. First, there is the natural gas converted into synthetic fertilizer and the diesel that runs the massive farm machinery. Then there’s the bunker fuel that runs the shipping (or worse, the jet fuel that flies chilled vegetables around the world). Trucking to the supermarket, driving to the supermarket, even the plastic packaging that the food comes in depends on fossil fuel feedstocks. While there are many social and ecological impacts of this method of food production and consumption which provide reasons for diversifying our methods, the most important reason is a purely economic one: Peak Oil. According to Jeff Rubin, the lifeblood of our food system is getting inexorably scarcer:
“In a world of dwindling oil supplies and steadily mounting demand around the world, there is no such thing as cheap oil. Oil might be less expensive in the middle of a recession, but it will never be cheap again”
This is not going to happen overnight, but the gist is that oil prices are going to become both higher and more volatile in the near future. This will translate directly into significantly higher prices for foods that have a significant fossil fuel input. The farther food has traveled, and the greater diesel and synthetic fertilizer input needed in its production, the greater the price increase at the superstore. This is not a theoretical assumption: the $147 a barrel oil prices facing the world in the summer of 2008 were a large part of the doubling or even tripling of the global prices of staples like rice, wheat, and corn. In this sense, urban agriculture is not just a social or ecological issue (though these are important reasons for community urban agriculture), but a food security issue.
As an example, FoodShare Ontario recently conducted a survey of the distance food had travelled at both a Supermarket and a Farmer’s Market. The supermarket food had travelled an average of 5,364 kilometres from farm to market, while the farmer’s market food had travelled a mere 101. The energy intensity of food can also be expressed in terms of the number of calories used to produce each kilogram of a specific food item. Some estimates show that nearly 2,000 kcal of energy are needed to get each kilogram of frozen fruit to the table. Breakfast cereal is nearly 15,000 kcal, and chocolate is a whopping 18,000 kcal. The wonderful thing about community gardens and community orchards is that those numbers are virtually zero. From an economic standpoint, it just makes sense to increase urban food production, especially in underutilized areas like parks and lawns.
Not only is the problem not merely a theoretical one, but the urban agriculture solution has already manifested itself on the world stage. When the Soviet Union collapsed in the early 90’s, Cuba was left high and dry. Stifled by the US trade embargo, it had relied on vast support from the Soviets in terms of subsidized fossil fuels, machinery, and farm inputs like fertilizers and pesticides. With the end of this support, caloric intake in Cuba more than halved almost overnight. It was like Peak Oil in fast motion. But with intensive research into organic solutions to pests and fertilizer shortages and the blossoming of 2,730 urban gardens and 4,347 larger gardens on the outskirts of cities, most municipalities now produce upwards of 30 percent of their own food. Havana now produces more than half a million tons of food every year.
The benefits of urban agriculture aren’t limited to food security. Projects like community orchards are the epitome of the adage “think globally, act locally”. They help to strengthen the resilience of neighbourhoods and give neighbours a reason to get to know one another. They provide a way for urban dwellers to connect to the natural world and the soil, and also provide the health benefits of active lifestyles and added nutrition from the healthy food grown. They’re also a lot of fun!

Bait Jala

2009-11-13T02:44:00.000-05:00

So, today I'm off to Bethlehem to visit with the family of one of my new friends here. I will be crossing the checkpoints into the West Bank, and maybe by next week I'll be able to bring some personal experience to PELS. I will fill you in on the trip upon my return.

It Gets Cold There?

2009-11-07T02:41:00.001-05:00

All those in the audience who are currently living in temperate climates, please excuse the following comment: It is getting cold here! Seriously though, I know that 20-25 during the day and 8-10 at night is a wimpy November, but it just kind of settled down upon us here. One day it was blistering hot and I could sleep, *ahem*, in my birthday suit, and then there were three days of crazy clouds and even crazier winds, and then….desert winter! Extreme climate I guess.

So it has now become clear to all of us that the Institute is not, as one of our profs put it, a “schluff off to Israel for six months kind of program.” There’s some serious work going on here. The work is a lot of reading, quizzes, and papers, but many projects too, and the projects are largely hands on. For Environmental Anthropology, our job is to do a mini ethnographic study, picking a little micro-culture of the Kibbutz – my group will be the Volunteers who serve food in the kitchen. For Environmental Education we develop five lesson plans, and then the prof actually hooks us up with an appropriate class in the area to carry out one of the lessons. One slight issue I’m having with the program so far is that the year at the Arava is essentially the same year as someone going through their undergrad – same classes, lots of introduction to ______ - but as a masters student we take it at the “masters” level. This essentially means harder assignments and exams. We also TA a class (environmental ethics for me, very enjoyable actually), and so when it comes down to getting to work on our masters projects, time is a bit of an issue! It’s tough when you want to be experiencing everything to its fullest (e.g. there’s a mountain expedition going for a few hours, work in the garden, a little self-run workshop), and you know that you should really stay in the room and work…C’est la Vie d’etudient master. Pardon my French, I barely knew it to begin with :-).

That’s not to say we don’t get to have any fun. We went hiking on one of the crazy cloud and wind days about a week ago, and I thought it’d be nice to have some pictures of the area up:

Here is the start of our hike, climbing through an ever narrowing Wadi up into the hills

A very cool rock formation - the geology here is pretty much naked

Sun and Shadow are a recurring theme in the desert

Just when you thought nothing could grow out of this stuff. Actually, this is in a Wadi bottom, "where the life

is"

Ummmm......Little help?

That is, literally, winter blowing in

Sun and shadow again - one one side, summer, on the other, winter.

And now, a moment that may shock you all. Parents with small children please use discretion (not really):

Before

After

Why?

Dunno.

Back with more soon!

Encounter Point

2009-11-02T07:26:00.000-05:00

Yesterday we had our third PELS session, and watched the movie encounter point, then had a discussion with two of the people featured in the documentary. If you have time to look into it, please do - it's a very important look into the peace and reconciliation movements on both sides of the line.

http://www.encounterpoint.com/index.php

Up and Down, Side to Side

2009-10-30T02:52:00.001-04:00

I apologize for the delay, this past week has been an incredibly interesting one, with not much time for a breath! Classes have rolled along, and people have settled into the rhythm of the place. In other words, the honeymoon period is nearing its end, and no longer is there an urgency to stay out in the quad until all hours so as not to miss a thing. We remember that school involves work, and so reading groups and discussion groups spring up alongside the gardening committees. It feels like a bit of a shame, turning summer camp back into school, but that, after all, is what we are here for! To become the environmental leaders of our generation, we’ve got to learn. But those first days have really paid off. I think everyone feels as if they’ve gotten to know everyone else enough to sit down next to them in the Kibbutz cafeteria and have a good conversation, or greet them with a warm smile/high five/big hug (depending on the cultural background and comfort level).

But wait, you probably ask, this all seems too easy. Can co-existence really be as simple as throwing everyone together and doing a few ice breakers? The answer is, of course, no. This is a really special place, set aside from all other influences in the middle of the desert. The second thing is that until one night this week there had been no explicit talking about the conflict, and where everyone stood in it. This is not only a natural thing for us to do, but is by design in the program. It is incredibly important for us to develop our personal relationships before we start talking about these things. An altercation caused by an emotional disagreement with someone you have just met can lead to a permanent rift, while the same thing with someone you have already become close with often leads to becoming even closer. This, at least, is the story that keeps coming back to us from former students here.

And so, at PELS last Sunday, we spent the entire three hours going over the principles of compassionate listening and laying out guidelines for talking about sensitive issues, and then talking about conflict mediation theory. I could see that to many of us it felt like going to a workshop on how to build a bookshelf and getting a lecture on the basic theories of geometry and physics. “Let’s get down to it! Let’s scuffle and hammer this thing out!” This opinion was voiced by a couple of people present – why are we dealing with such abstract things! We’ve talked about conflict for three hours and not a single word about the Middle East. The answer given these people was simple – “Patience. We’ll get to that soon enough, as you will as a matter of course. For now we must learn how to talk about these things, before we can actually do it.” And sure enough, they were right – but first to Jerusalem!

My parents were in town this week hiking with the One Family Fund to raise money for victims of terrorism. If anyone who gave them money is reading this, thank you for sending my parents to me! I got to go up to Jerusalem last weekend and stay with them, taking part in the One Family Fund activities. This included a five hour guided tour of the old city, lots of good food, and getting to meet some great people. We also spent a fair bit of time with some family friends who are in Israel for a year, living in Jerusalem. Getting an insight into what it’s like to be a liberal North American in the midst of such an intense place was interesting. Jerusalem is beautiful, endlessly fascinating, but undeniably heavy.

Here is a view of the sunrise on a hike with my parents, taken over the gulf of Eilat with Jordan in the distance.

And here, of course, is ha Horim Sheli!

But here’s the thing that made my week so interesting: You go to Jerusalem, and you can see it all from a single vantage point. You see the old city, and beyond that, the Arab neighborhoods of east Jerusalem, still almost entirely separate from the Jewish areas even though Israel officially annexed them. You look into the distance and you can see that beyond such and such a point is the West Bank. You realize that THIS is what the entire ruckus is about, right here. As the tour guide pointed out, according to a mixture of biblical and secular history, the mount where the dome of the rock stands was the place where Abraham would have sacrificed Isaac/Ishmael, then the place of the first temple, then the second temple, the seat of the Jewish Empire, then conquered by Muslims, Christian Crusaders, Muslims again, and so on and on. This is disputed territory. Even within religions the different sects muscle each other around the real estate.

I then went for dinner with my parents, and a number of speakers were telling their heart-wrenching stories about losing their children to terrorism. There is something entirely intractable about this kind of loss and pain – something that can never be reconciled with politics. You can only weep. Coming home from the dinner at around midnight, I came across the first circle in the quad explicitly discussing the conflict. This was prompted by watching the movie Bil’in Habibti, about the protests at the separation barrier that have happened every week since 2005 in the village of Bil’in in the West Bank. This is probably the most egregious case of Israel simply using the barrier to expropriate land for settlements, uprooting olive trees, and disregarding the Palestinian residents. The result has been the formation of a non-violence resistance movement at Bil’in. I mostly sat and listened as people poured their hearts into the discussion, and I watched as a number of people applied the and explicitly talked about the stuff we learned at PELS.

Anyway, it is now the weekend, time for relaxing and catching up. I’ve been very busy this week, and need to catch up on some readings – about how to store excess renewable energy production for future use, about ancient agriculture in the desiccated Uvda Valley, about Health Impact Assessments, and about mycorrhiza! Am I overwhelmed? Yes :-). Am I having fun? You bet

hmmm....here's a story I wanted to fit in but couldn't find a place for:
In a cab ride recently, the driver asked me if I didn't go into the army in Canada. I said no. He looked shocked - why not? he demanded. Very few people do, I answered, it's not a big army. He tried to understand, and just shook his head. .

There's School and there's Learning

2009-10-20T14:46:00.000-04:00

Orientation is over, and the real work around here has begun. Our first class was on Sunday, an uncredited compulsory class called Peace Building and Environmental Leadership Seminar (PELS) - it is classes like this that attracted me to the Arava Institute in the first place. PELS is a class that everyone takes, and its goal is to bring everyone together to develop skills like mediation, conflict resolution, compassionate listening, and so on, and also to provide an open and controlled space for students to confront the “conflict”. I have heard that this class often dissolves into tears, shouting, and frustrations, only to be followed further by resolutions, hugs, and singing. So far, however, none of this has materialized, and the atmosphere around here has been incredibly relaxed. Everyone wants to learn everyone else’s language, and concern for environmental issues does a very good job of bringing everyone together to learn. But we’ve only all been here for a few days, so we’ll see how things go
In the first PELS class, the major activity that we ran was an identity card swap, where we all put our cards and passports in the middle and spent some time examining each other’s official identity. We talked about how we each feel about them, whether we identify with the body that issued us the cards, and how we feel about being identified with it by other people. I, of course, am extremely grateful to have my Canadian passport. Though I’m a little frustrated with the Federal government and Canadian politics (especially the government’s dragging of its feet over climate change – www.350.org!), I identify strongly as Canadian and am proud to be a Canadian. I am also grateful for the way I am treated abroad as a Canadian. I don’t think that I would have trouble going anywhere with this identity. The Israelis, on the other hand, were more ambivalent not so much about being proud to be Israeli, but about how the world receives them. Apparently, just as Americans travelling abroad say that they’re Canadian to avoid hassle, Israelis claim to be Italian! Also, with an Israeli passport many countries are off limits (as they are for me with an Israeli Visa and stamp in my passport). The Palestinians also did not feel ambivalent about being Palestinian, but have a different experience with their identity cards than even the Jordanian citizens have with their passports. While having an ID card means the right to travel within the territories, it also means subjection to the huge number of checkpoints dotting the West Bank, and often (but not usually), subjection to hassle, wasted time, and humiliation.
Yesterday I went to my first classes, Archaeology/Human Ecology and Alternative Energy Policy and Management. I’m enrolled in a bit of a mish-mash of environmental classes, since after all I’m completing the environmental studies specialization of the BGU masters. The other courses I’m taking are Environmental Anthropology, Environmental Education, and Eco-Health. The classes are taught in English, and so it is sometimes a bit of a challenge to keep everyone on the same page, especially since everyone is at a different stage in their education. A large number of the Arab students have first degrees in engineering, and others in biology or chemistry, and they’re studying thermodynamics next to people who haven’t taken science in 5 years. The classes are very lively though, with a lot of discussion, sometimes heated (for those of you who know Israelis, this shouldn’t surprise you). There’s a lot getting off the ground in student life from gardening to Arabic and Hebrew lessons and English writing tutoring to hiking and music. Everyone’s still in flux and getting adjusted to being back in school, but we should settle into some sort of rhythm pretty soon.
The sun is shining and the birds are just beginning to migrate south to Africa from Europe through the corridor of the Arava Valley. The days are getting shorter and the nights slightly cooler, though I haven’t used a blanket since I arrived. Also, my parents are coming into Israel this weekend for a brief charity walk with One Family Fund. Yay!

Music and Laughter

2009-10-16T19:12:00.001-04:00

Coming back to my room, it is now one o’clock in the morning. I don’t want to go to bed yet; there are still people hanging out in the quad and I don’t want to miss a minute of this special time when everyone is still settling in, figuring each other out, and high off of just arriving to begin the program. I feel though that if I don’t go to bed soon I will fall asleep in the grass. So just to give you a brief glimpse of how things look around here, here is a brief tour around the tiny quad outside of the Arava Institute Dorms. There are a few people gathered around a guitar, played by a lanky Israeli hippie who’s trying desperately to get out of the army reserves – they are singing Hebrew songs, almost all of which gravitate around A minor, C, and G. I join in here and there on another guitar or my harmonica, sometimes trying to sing along. I take the lead and play moondance, and Gabe, an 18 year old American kid from Cleveland, rips on the Sax. A little further down from us on the grass a few Americans are laughing and chatting with some Israelis and a Palestinian or two. Gabe and I spend about 45 minutes taking a Capoeira lesson from one of the Israelis who has just returned from Brazil – it is one of the fundamental differences between Americans and Israelis that they get down to business with school only after 2-3 years in the army, maybe one of community service, and then big year-long trips around the world to India, South America, East Asia, the US. Most of the Israelis in the program are 22-24, and have never gone to any post-secondary schooling before. Their life experience, however, is incredible. After drinking about a litre of water and cooling off on the grass I head over to the area where the Arab students have set up a couple hookahs and are laughing and talking away in Arabic. The circle is dotted with Americans and Israelis, but the conversation is mostly in Arabic – for the Arabic students the day today was full of choosing classes, registration, filling out forms, and all that other administration stuff that is the necessary evil of running an institution, all in a language that even the most advanced of them are not thinking in yet. How exhausting! The conversation often turns to asking each other how to say certain words and phrases in each other’s respective language, laughing as we try to pronounce the words. Over a little bit, Wa’ad and Yasmiin are trying to teach a few Israelis some Arabic dancing.

Music is coming from all around and the soft sounds of chatter and laughter pervade the space. Everyone is incredibly welcoming to each other, a hopeful sign for the months ahead. Getting to know one another and getting a sense of where we are all coming from will be very important once we start talking politics, as in the compulsory non-credit course called Peace-building and Environmental Leadership seminar, or PELS. This is where we get down to the dirty business of talking about why things are not always as pleasant as they are behind the scenes, out of context in a magical no-man’s-land such as the Arava Institute. I don’t know where the quote is from, but I remember it well: If you stand beside a person at the bus stop for ten minutes and say nothing, you may not ever think about him or her again. But speak for one minute, find out about their children, their job, some music they like, and you may just feel willing to jump out in front of that bus to save their life. Yell at them for an hour about your differences of opinion, and you may become friends for life – this is how the Arava Institute supposedly works. Anyway, I’m going to sleep – will be in touch soon.

Jordan

2009-10-14T10:46:00.010-04:00

It is really pretty interesting that in my last post I mused about how near and yet so far Israel and Jordan are from each other, specifically Eilat and Aqaba which literally share a small stretch of coastline. Well, on a spur of the moment plan, a few of decided to spend our last couple days before school started on a whirlwind trip across the border to Aqaba and up to Petra, staying the night first on the beach in Eilat and then in a Bedouin tent. To get the theatrics over now, here is the view from the main siq in Petra, walking down a stone path with 50 meter stone walls around you, imagining the endless stream of caravans from the east carrying spices and eastern goods to trade. Getting to the end, the most miraculous wonder of Petra, build by Nabateans about 300 BC, is the Treasury, a near immaculately preserved facade 50 meters tall. It is largely this iconic image that won Petra membership among the new seven wonders of the world. Pictured below is the Treasury in all its glory:

So how did this trip come about? Well, in honor of Juliette's (one of the volunteers) departure to Tel Aviv and the beginning of school for the Arava Institute students, we decided to take a little trip. Juliette, who knows about 6 languages, had met a Venezuelan woman on the bus from Tel Aviv to Ketura, and struck

up a conversation in spanish. It turned out that this woman knew some Bedouin around the Petra area, who hooked us up with a car, a tour of Petra, and a place to sleep in Wadi Musa, the modern town built up around Petra. They were some of the kindest people I’ve ever met, and even invited us to their family home in Wadi Musa, but more on that later. The whole trip from start to finish probably cost only 150 canadian, and that’s including bus, car, food, tour, and accommodations. Not Bad! The following pictures are a little photo essay about the trip.

The first night we spent on a beach in Eilat, camping out on a pier looking back on the city. Camping is much more relaxed in Eilat than it would be in, say, Florida. This is a picture looking into Jordan from our camping spot at sunrise.

In the morning we had to cross the Jordanian border, which cost us about 25 dollars canadian. The change in atmosphere between Eilat and Aqaba was more drastic than between Toronto and Tel Aviv. You could feel it in the air. Especially striking was the shot of one of the members of the Jordanian Royal Family with the flag waving in the background. It was then that we really felt we had entered not just a new country, but a whole new culture. On the drive up from Aqaba to Petra we got lost, and had to ask a Bedouin man, his family at his side, where to go. This was the only good picture we got of them before they ran from the camera. Here is a picture of Ibrahim, our tour guide through Petra. He was brilliant in many aspects, like physically knowing the place like the back of his hand and taking us through much less travelled areas, but the history we were likely to get from him was not exactly textbook. At one point he suggested that if I had trouble believing him I should go read the sign to find out what the "government" said about the place.Here are some pictures from our Bedouin experience. One of the massive delicious dinner they made us, one of the outside of their house in Wadi Musa, one of the view from their house over Wadi Musa, and one of Gabe playing on the floor with one of their nieces, who's 5 months old. They were lovely people, open and hospitable, and very lively.Finally, here is a very picturesque Bedouin with the Jordanian Desert in the background.

So right now, having only been back for less than 24 hours, the other students are arriving! I must go out and meet my new friends and colleagues! I will be writing about that soon enough!

Eilat

2009-10-10T04:55:00.001-04:00

Eilat is an incredibly interesting place, different from anywhere I’ve ever been. I’d like to compare it to places in Florida, in the sense that there are big, majestic hotels everywhere, the majority of the people around are on vacation, and there are big malls, movie theaters, and boardwalks where the shopping is great if that’s your thing. The beaches, too, are fantastic, though a bit rocky, and packed with people. It was a holiday when we went, so tons of Israelis from all over the north were flocking down to Eilat do their shopping, relaxing, and snorkeling – come to think of it, Eilat is essentially all of Florida collapsed into a tiny area about 1/10,000 the size. It serves the same function – that of the vacation/resort spot in the south, but in the form of a city that is home to maybe 50,000 people. So we did what everyone else does when they go to Eilat – hit the beach!

Here are Gabe, Adi, and Phil in the chairs with Abra walking behind them. You can see that the beach is not the kindest to tender feet.

It was a tiny beach, incredibly rocky and maybe only 100 meters long, but we could barely find a chair to plop ourselves down in. It didn’t take us long to discover why so many people came here though – you could see the reefs and shimmering colorful fish through the crystal clear water morphing to aquamarine and royal blue as your eye moved out to sea. We rented some snorkels and swam out to see the reefs off the shore, and I have to say it made me, for a short time, wish that I had chosen to study marine rather than terrestrial biology and ecology. I have an affinity for the outlandish and strange, and diving down to get a closer look at the bright purple corals with schools of tiny blue fish hovering around them, I really felt like an adventurer discovering new and wonderful life forms. At least twenty kinds of fish hung out around the reefs, all of them with their own unique and beautiful patterning and personality. And thinking about the movie sharkwater, which is probably the most powerful and gripping enviro-doc I’ve ever seen, the one thing that I wanted to see the most in the world and the least in the world at the same time was a shark. Readers may be relieved to know that the biggest fish I saw was this guy, about a foot long and eating bread out of a misguided tourist’s hand:

Probably the most interesting thing about Eilat was its proximity to Egypt on the one side, Jordan on the other, and even Saudi Arabia a little ways down the eastern gulf coast. Eilat and Aqaba are so very close in terms of distance, probably a 20 minute walk! Look the other way and you can see Sinai mountains, and you can even see Saudi Arabia down the Jordan coast, though it’s a little hazier. Since 1979 and 1994 Israel has had a peace with Egypt and Jordan respectively, but the remnants of the animosity are still visible in many places, such as the layers of rusting barbed wire surrounding our Kibbutz. I can only image how one might have felt standing in Eilat in 1977, before any peace treaties, and looking out at three countries that would have been happier if you didn’t exist, two of which having attacked your country only four years earlier. Here’s a google map of the area, so you can get a better idea:

http://maps.google.com/maps?q=eilat%20aqaba&rls=com.microsoft:en-ca:IE-SearchBox&oe=UTF-8&sourceid=ie7&rlz=1I7GGLL_en&um=1&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&sa=N&tab=il&start=0

Later that night, after walking the long boardwalk lined with cheap clothes and trinket sellers with a few bigger name stores spotting the walk, we caught wind of the first ever beer festival in Eilat. After receiving directions from a falafel seller, about five of us made it over there, drank some really nice international beers, and listened to a couple of Israeli cover bands. A couple of the guys in our group knew the Israeli covers, though I didn’t, but even I knew what was coming when they broke out into the opening riff for Kryptonite by 3 Doors Down. Hearing that song with an Israeli accent may be one of the things that has endeared me to this country the most so far. We finally caught the 1 o’clock bus back to the Kibbutz, a 35 minute ride, and collapsed into our beds.

L'Chaim!

The Experimental Orchard

2009-10-06T16:08:00.003-04:00

So the last few days I have been a little bit sick, starting with a little sore throat and spreading to my nose to the point where I feel like a magician pulling an endless kerchief out of my sleeve, only it’s mucus…from my nose…ok, bad image, but that’s how it feels. Why so sick in such a salubrious, hot, dry place you may ask? Well I haven’t been sleeping that much, and have been having a great time! Those two things are by no means purely incidental. Two major events have dominated the scene since I last posted, so I’m going to take this post to fill you in on them. The first was the tour of the institute’s center for sustainable agriculture, and the second was yesterday’s trip to Eilat, my first trip off the Kibbutz (other than hiking in the little hills out back) since I got here almost two weeks ago.

Two days ago, Elaine Solowey, who will be my supervisor here at the Arava Institute, took us all out on a tour of the experimental orchard she founded about 25 years ago and which houses some unbelievable desert specimens from around the world. But collection is not the main agenda with her orchard – she is aiming to be a part of what she would call the second domestication. Agriculture began about 13,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, and had independent foundings in a few other parts of the world like China and MesoAmerica. Through selection of seeds, farmers thousands of years ago domesticated essentially every single food that is eaten on a large scale today. But over the past fifty years, crop diversity, both species and genetic, has been rapidly declining as seed sales have conglomerated into fewer and fewer hands, and the demands of an international market for consistency lead to the same seeds and methods being practiced all over the world. Some put the number at about 2 percent a year. The concept of socio-ecological resilience is based around diversity and functional redundancy, and as those things decline, a system like the global food system is much more vulnerable to shocks.

A Marula Tree, native to Southern Africa, is one of the fruit trees that Elaine has successfully bred a couple lines of for high yield and big, juicy fruit. It's related to the mango, but you just have to bite into the fruit, tear a hole in the skin, and suck out the delicious juice. They're making it into brandy and fruit juice on the Kibbutz.

So Elaine is busy collecting wild desert plants with useful properties and attempting to domesticate them. As she says, she loves plants that “rejoice to be in the desert”, and most of the crops she’s working on use as much water in a year as the date palms next door use in a week, and need almost no pesticides or fertilizers. Her major success stories are four wild plants that she has selected over a few generations to the point where they can be planted commercially – one of which will be central to my life for the next two years: the Argan. This tree is endemic to about 100 million acres in Morrocco (now, due to deforestation and land use change, this is down to about 50 million), and is central to the lives of the people who live in the Argan forest. They use the tree for the oil contained in the nut of the fruit (which is also its trade value), but since the tree can remain green through periods where almost everything has gone dormant it can also provide much needed fodder for animals and shade when there’s nothing else around. It a beautiful tree with a very, very deep root system that flourishes in the driest of conditions and provides a very high quality oil, good fodder for animals, and extremely good wood when coppiced – Amazing! Looking around the experimental orchard, you’re struck by just how much valuable diversity and potential surrounds you.

This is a pitaya, the fruit of a cactus that Elaine has had success growing on the orchard and adapting to the extreme desert climate. The varieties she's developed are now off to other growers.

A couple interesting side notes about Elaine for those interested: One is that she was in the news a lot a couple years ago because of her central involvement in the germination of an ancient date seed recovered in an excavation of Herod’s Temple! The seedling, named Methuselah (I would have voted for Rip Van Winkle :-), is now a couple years old and growing strong. We may have right here at the Institute the re-animation of the ancient Judean date palm, thought to be functionally extinct. Another fantastic story arose from a project of hers consisting of growing Tibetan medicinal herbs to help preserve some very rare specimens. It just so happened that when the Dalai Lama was in Israel, he caught wind of the project and had to see it himself. There is a wonderful picture of Elaine and the Dalai Lama arm in arm holding a Pitaya.

This last one is the Argan, which will be my intellectual darling for the next two years. In the tree are goats (yes, goats). There is a special breed of goats in Morrocco that climbs the trees looking for tender shoots amongst the sharp thorns, and the ripe fruit containing the precious nut. In accounts dating back to the 17th century, a common experience is related about the fruit. Upon cutting it open, you are met with an incredibly delectable, almost cloying smell. Then you bite into the fruit and its taste makes you a little naseous. I have to say, this is entirely true.

So what exactly will I be doing? People with aversions to science talk may want to stop reading now ;-). I will be examining the soil around the roots of the Argan to see what sort of creatures are symbiotic (literally, living together) with the tree roots. It is known that this tree is very mycorrhizal dependent, meaning that it grows much better when it has fungi infecting its roots. Here infecting is the technical term, and doesn’t mean they’re pathological, but the fungi really does penetrate the root cells. These fungi extend the surface area of the root system sometimes by as much as an order of magnitude, scavenging for scarce nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorous in exchange for carbohydrates that the tree makes through photosynthesis. Since the trees are growing very well, and Elaine never inoculated them with any commercial strains of mycorrhiza, I want to figure out if they’ve recruited any little friends native to the soil here, and if so who they are. I’m pretty excited about it: symbioses are one of the most fascinating aspects of biology – and a potential way forward in thinking about sustainability.

So that’s a little taste of where I am and what I’ll be thinking about, I mean, besides navigating an explicitly multi-ethnic and very political living situation and program. Countdown till worlds collide: 8 days.

Woohoo!

p.s. I guess Eilat will have to wait for next time. Oops.

A few thousand words

2009-10-02T19:19:00.000-04:00

So I thought that I may be yammering on and on, without even giving you a picture to orient yourselves! So this entry will be short on words, big on images.

This is a picture of, from left:

Me, Becca (volunteer), Liz (volunteer), Philip (Australian), Adi, Lauren, and Bennie Mac

We are at the top of the "mountain of electricity" where the power lines come in, overlooking the Arava Valley and the Kibbutz

This is a picture of the Kibbutz from a little lower. You can see the date orchards accross the highway, and where the trees end in the background is essentially where Jordan starts. The mountains you can see are Jordanian.

Here is a picture of a bunch of us in a Wadi (dry river bed) during one of our hikes.

Here is a picture of me touching a very sharp, thorny Acacia tree, some of which are green the whole year round despite the fact that they receive maybe three paltry days of rain a year.

Having a little fun, a few of us decided to decorate Adi's (orange shirt) door for his birthday today. From left to right we are Benjamin Morgan, Me, Adi, Gabe (top) and Phil (bottom)

On a hike yesterday we got to see a rare and beautiful sight - a flower in full bloom in the desert - this one is a desert caper.

And finally, here's me having a little fun on my slackline around the pool area. Don't worry mom, I'm wearing sunscreen.

It's a pretty good life around here.

Down on the Kibbutz

2009-09-30T14:44:00.001-04:00

So, if you’ve been following along you must be wondering just what I’ve been doing in the five days I’ve been on the Kibbutz (aside from drinking and dancing with the volunteers and the Garin). Let me give you a little run-down of how things have been working around here. The Kibbutz is called Kibbutz Ketura, and it’s about fifty miles north of Eilat, which is right on the Gulf of Aqaba. We went on a hike up a steep trail just outside the Kibbutz the other evening, and as the lights came on down the coast you could see Eilat blending into the Jordanian city of Aqaba, which is about twice as big. The Jordanian border is extremely close to the Kibbutz – so close that a few days ago my friend Adi and I walked out of the Kibbutz, across the highway, through the date orchard, along the windbreak of the experimental orchard, and in about ten minutes we hit a sign saying STOP! BORDER AHEAD! Though Jordan and Israel have a peace, Israel is incredibly strict about wandering through the border. People say that they have seen Israeli soldiers come to the Kibbutz looking for the person who left their size 11 New Balance footprint on the other side! It was funny to hear the student life coordinator, on hearing that we were going for a walk outside the Kibbutz, say not “have fun!” but “Don’t go to Jordan!” In an earlier post I wrote about how small Israel seemed. Now I can feel it firsthand.

There are a number of different groups of people living together on the Kibbutz, which leads to some interesting dynamics. Firstly, there are the Kibbutznicks themselves, largely American Jews who have made aliyah. From what I have heard, many of the Kibbutz children don’t stay on the kibbutz for their adult life, and so much of the new population is new American blood rather than legacies. Ketura is one of the few Kibbutzim to have stuck with the real socialist ideology of the original Kibbutz movement, and so all income and all work is shared. However, one interesting deviation from the original ideology is that at some point, the Kibbutz decided that to make a profit on the date orchard, they needed to actually hire laborers rather than relying purely on Kibbutz labor and volunteers. So another contingent of the Kibbutz is about ten or fifteen Thai workers who come over for a year or two to work for relatively cheap, and then return to Thailand rich. Apparently they speak Thai, a little Hebrew, and almost no English. There are a few different means of income for Ketura, mainly dairy, dates, a really cool algae operation, and a few small businesses including a small cake company. They’re looking to expand and diversify though, getting into solar as well. Siemens has funded about 40 percent of a small solar project that’s hopefully a first step into a solar economy, so we can see firsthand how the Kibbutzim have to keep evolving to get by and thrive. I haven’t gotten to speak with many of the Kibbutzniks yet, but life on Ketura seems pretty relaxed and low key (for Israel anyway!), with few pretensions.

Secondly, there are the volunteers, mostly Jews but also some non-Jews, who come from around the world and take free room and board in exchange for doing work around the Kibbutz. For the most part these are kids taking a gap year either after high school or somewhere in their undergrad, out and about in the world “finding themselves” or just having a good time. There’s a group of eight Australian guys who are travelling together after high school, a number of Aussie girls, a few Americans, a couple Brits, one Scottish girl, a South African guy, and even a girl who lives at…Bathurst and Sheppard! Into this category I’m going to slip the people who are just here to visit the Kibbutz, which makes a little income on tourism as well.

Thirdly, there are the Garin, Israelis just out of high school who are doing a year of community service work before entering the army. I haven’t spent a lot of time with them, but from the interactions I have had, they seem like really solid, joyful kids a few years younger than me. They’ve got the Israeli energy and slight cheekiness I’ve been noticing all around Israel thus far.

Lastly, there’s the Machon, or Arava Institute. While the Institute finds its home on Ketura, and some faculty are also Kibbutzniks (about 13 out of 140 members work at the Machon), there is a slight uneasiness in the relationship. This is only natural when you think of a group of about 150 Kibbutzniks and their families living on a small patch of green in the middle of the Desert. The place is pretty enclosed and isolated and Kibbutz life is good and simple, but also hard. When you’re on the Kibbutz, everything is taken care of, from three meals a day to laundry service to child care, swimming pool, playgrounds and playing fields. But as one of the founding members said tonight, after all of this is paid for by the Kibbutz, the division of funds to members according to their needs leaves everyone feeling a little cash poor. So if you’re going to be a real member, and commit to the socialism, you’re going to feel pretty territorial about your stuff. Now throw into the mix about 20 volunteers, a bunch of Garin, and then about 50 undergrad and masters students from around the region and the world! I haven’t seen it first hand, but it should be interesting.

So far life here has been pretty smooth and relaxed. We’ve been swimming in the pool, hiking in the desert, playing football with the Aussies and Garin, playing music at night, and basically finding our footing and getting adjusted to life here have been our main activities. Now that the holidays are over and the Kibbutz schedule is back to normal we’re doing an Ulpan for most of the mornings. The students who’ve arrived so far are mostly American, with a token appearance from the commonwealth in my person and an Aussie named Philip. We come from diverse backgrounds, from California to Omaha to New York to North Carolina, from Day School to totally secular, and from right out of high school to beginning a masters degree. The diversity will only increase from here.

So there’s the set-up so far, in brief. I’ll keep you posted as things heat up!

Night 2 / Re-run

2009-09-26T20:34:00.000-04:00

It is very late, even though the time change gave us an extra hour tonight. We used it to keep the Kibbutz pub open an extra hour and dance. The Machon (Arava students), the volunteers, and the Garin (pre-army civil service Israelis) all danced together until we were forced to shut down around 1:30, and, still awake, I come writing to you. But I am tired, so as a cop out, though a fitting one, I am going to post one of my letters from the farm from last summer. The stars are gorgeous here, and they made me feel like I did one night on the farm:

Out here on the farm, you can really see the stars. Not one or two of the most persistent ones, breaking through the glowing haze of the human hive, but pretty much the whole deal, milky way and all. And yes, they do make you feel small. It’s not for nothing that God promised Abraham that his descendants would be like the sand and the stars. Long ago it was clear to most people that the stars, the planets, the sun and the moon were god-like. They encircled the earth on which people lived and which was the center of the universe, cared dearly about and greatly affected world affairs, could be placated with gifts and pleas. For most ancient people the passing of the sun, moon, and planets through different constellations of the “fixed” stars bore portentous information about the ages and epochs of the world and what they would bring. Many viewed the drama of earth as a very brief sequence, a flash of five or six thousand years which would end in apocalypse, and possibly rebirth.

Today the stars are largely silent. They do not speak our language, but the language of radio telescopes, pulsing electromagnetic radiation by which we can, across the gulf of light years and ages, decipher their chemical make-up, their stage of “life,” and much more. The drama of the stars is breathtaking – gigantic supernovas, multiple star systems in intricate dances, black holes ripping space-time – but is the same sort of drama as the moving of continents, the buckling up of mountains, and the advance of glaciers. There is less tragedy in the death of a star that in that of a butterfly. I look at the stars and long so much for there to be something else out there capable of speaking to us in our language. Maybe someone out there can help us, give us some wisdom. Things would be so much easier if we could, like those ancients, read the answers to our questions in the stars. But maybe the vastness of space, that great physical emptiness of things like us, can serve as the same sort of abyss as the one that I talked about last week. If The Answer cannot be divinely inspired or sent from outer space, that leaves things to us. On the one hand, this is quite a responsibility. On the other hand, it is incredibly liberating.

But where to start? We have access today to the great works of almost every tradition on earth, from the Upanishads to the Tanach to Plato to Lao Tzu to the Tibetan Book of the dead. There must have been more books written in the last fifty years than in the whole rest of the 5,000 years since the written word and maybe 50,000 since the art of storytelling emerged. I love wandering in used book stores. Some people need dope fixes, I need my browsing fix. My latest read, by Ryscard Kapuscinski, is called Travels with Herodotus, and is an autobiography of a man who spent time covering events all over the world for 50 years. He describes the conundrum of feeling incredibly small in the face of this expanse of humanity, yet somehow wanting to understand it: “It was a kind of malady, a dangerous weakness, because I also realized that these civilizations are so enormous, so rich, complex and varied, that getting to know even a fragment of one of them would require devoting one’s whole life to the enterprise.” I would add that the same goes for any single person, present or past. In fact, the longer I spend on this planet the more I realize that getting to know even myself feels like standing before the stars.

I used to feel as though if I read enough, learned enough, gathered all the relevant information, then I could really make a final decision on things, then I would know who I was and what I wanted. I would have it all figured out. But like that old hydra, you bite into one question and two grow back in its place. Read one book and three more seem necessary. Wouldn’t it be great to know the story of everyone on the subway car with you? One instinct at this junction is to throw in the towel and say that since we can’t know everything we shouldn’t bother trying. But instead of wanting to understand it all like I did before, I think I've slowly shifted towards wanting to be a part of it all. It's better to be happy with the one book that I'm reading, the one person I'm talking to, the one course I'm taking in life, than to be sad about the millions of books I'm not reading, the billions of people I'm not talking to, and the infinite courses I'm not taking in life. I think I’m growing to love my smallness more and more.

So, there it is. This experience is pretty overwhelming, but I'm loving it.

Touchdown

2009-09-25T17:15:00.000-04:00

I’m on my way to Jerusalem, and the sun is setting over the parched hills on the horizon. The flight wasn’t nearly as long as I had imagined – only 10 hours. Most people would be frankly relieved by this, but I was actually disappointed. I love being in transit, having a good chunk of time between places where I can step back from my life and think about it from a new perspective. This is also why I really do love taking the train rather than flying (it’s for the environment too, but I suppose I could be doing it grudgingly). I was telling the woman next to me on the plane why I was disappointed to only have ten hours, six of them asleep, and went on to tell her about how wonderful my two and a half day train ride from Toronto to Green River , Utah was. She said: You don’t have children. I have six. I don’t like my trips to be longer than they have to be. Touché.

And now the sun has set over the hills, and the Orthodox man sitting in the seat next to me is moving effortlessly back and forth between his prayer book and his cell-phone. I’ve received help from no fewer than three smiling faces in the hour I’ve been on the ground: A gentle elderly man who chased me down because I dropped my swim goggles from my bag, the Russian about my age who held my hand through getting a bus ticket and getting on the right bus, the 14 year old girl who let me use her cell phone (which had a topless picture of Eminem as the background). I’m getting excited to start learning Hebrew through immersion rather than just my Rosetta Stone, though I’m happy to see that I can pick words and phrases up here and there already. Since I picked up the Arabic alphabet before I left, I can now at least sound out all three versions of the messages at the airport. Meaning is the tricky part.

And now it is dark, and I’m on my way to one of the oldest cities on Earth, where people weep in the streets for what they believe happened there thousands of years ago. I’m glad that after my travels I’ll be met at the station by a friendly face. I struck a deal with the people at the Arava that since nothing was really going to happen in the ten hours between 1:00 am and 11:00 am, I could meet up with my friend Daniel in Jerusalem and stay with him for the night, taking the early bus out of Jerusalem in the morning. Then, at 11:00, I start my new life here. But until then, it’s kind of nice to still be in transit for a while.

On a Jet Plane

2009-09-23T16:34:00.000-04:00

Well my bags are packed and I’m ready to go….

I managed to fit all of my stuff into one backpacking pack, one MEC rolly bag, and one little backpack. This includes a fine selection from my personal library – trimmed down about 12 times. Those of you who know me well know that I can’t go to the corner store without bringing ample reading material (just in case!), so choosing what to pack with a weight limit required some discipline. I mean, how can I know that I won’t wake up in the middle of the night in a cold sweat reaching for...oh I don’t know…Camus’ The Fall or Biomimicry by Janine Benyus or Look Homeward Angel by Thomas Wolf?

But I digress

For the past month I’ve been just enjoying the lovely Indian Summer that’s blessed Toronto – for a city as big and built up as it is, you’d be surprised how easy it is to bike anywhere without even going on a road. Using the free bike map provided by the city, you can literally spend all day every day exploring new routes and areas, discovering treasures you’d never find in a car. But be that as it may, I’m just about finished floating down the lazy river. A person can only take so much vacation. Give me my paddle; I’m ready for the rapids!

It’s blowing my mind a little bit that in about 24 hours I will be touching down in Tel Aviv, hopping on a bus, and arriving at the Arava Institute about 1:00 a.m. on Friday morning. I’ll be met by the student life coordinator, shuttle my stuff up to my room, and hopefully catch some shut-eye before a big bike ride at 6:30 a.m. I hope I don’t get whole-self whiplash.

0 to 100 in 24 hours – I can’t wait!

From Generation to Generation

2009-09-18T17:21:00.002-04:00

Do we have a moral responsibility to ensure that the people who will be living in five, fifty, and five hundred years have the same richness of opportunities, richness and diversity of life, and richness of natural environment that we currently enjoy? In a discussion I once had with a moral philosophy student, she argued that environmentalists are guilty of an ethical lapse since they put the well-being of future generations ahead of the well-being of many people currently living on the planet. After all, who is this abstract future generation, and how can we tell, say, people starving in a developing country that they cannot exploit resources for their own survival, all for the benefit of potential people of the future? There is a real dilemma here, and it is absolutely clear that environmental and social inequity are tied together, but our ultimate goal has to be sustainability above all. As hard as it is for social equality to flourish now, if environmental degradation continues on its present course then it will be much harder for future generations, especially the supposedly 9 billion people who will populate the globe by 2050.

I feel this now deep down in my gut, because a very short time ago I became an uncle. My beautiful darling niece is now 19 days old, and anything but abstract. I saw her minutes after she was born, and I just wasn’t prepared for how new she was. The wonderful thing about people is that every single person is thrown into the world totally fresh, and each person gets to discover it for themselves. She was as fresh as a person can get, and the pure joy and hope involved in such a moment can knock you off your feet. She will be the age I am now in 2032, just about the time that the British Science Advisor has predicted a perfect storm of food, water, and energy shortages, throwing the world into political, social, and environmental disarray. Those two thoughts, one the face of my niece as I held her moments after her birth, and the other the potential future that lies in store for her and her generation, react with each other to make my resolve to do something about it stronger than ever.

Tonight is the eve of Rosh Hashanah, the New Year in the Jewish calendar. While history is inexorably creeping forward, our personal lives are largely organized by cycles – the daily cycle, weekly cycle, the monthly cycle, the yearly cycle, and the cycle of birth and death. We are constantly returning to the beginning, able to start a new day, a new week, a new year, a new life. No matter how old you are, each day is a rebirth, a chance to once again discover the world all over again, and an opportunity to create the world all over again. It is an endless flow of opportunity, but an endless cycle of responsibility. This new year, take an opportunity to think of the new life being brought into the world, and do what you can to ensure that their opportunity for joy doesn’t diminish one bit.

The Arava Institute

2009-09-16T10:17:00.003-04:00

I thought it would be good to link anyone following this to a couple of videos about the Arava Institute.

First, here's the institute website if you want to browse around: http://www.arava.org/

Here's the official video made by the institute: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iu3biFTak2I&feature=fvst

Here's a collection of videos made by Alexandra Coustaeu (yes, Jaques Coustaeu's granddaughter) interviewing some students and professors from the institute as part of her project to document water stories from around the world. Also there's a clip of some Arava students on CNN: http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=D5A9D9D4DF4FBC36&search_query=arava+institute

You can imagine how excited I am to be part of this project!

Where I Will Be - The Desert

2009-09-11T08:45:00.006-04:00

I don’t know exactly when it was that I fell in love with deserts. In the last five years there were a few books I read that really turned me on to their amazing biology and ecology (Voice of the Desert, Desert Solitaire), but I think that there must be something about me as I’ve gotten older that’s drawn me to these places. Allow me to meditate a little bit on the life of the desert and maybe I can help you understand why they excite me so much.

Life began in the oceans 3.8 billion years ago and until about 400 million years ago, almost nothing even attempted to colonize the harsh, dry land. The story of life on land is not the story of gradually leaving the oceans, but the story of how to ever more cleverly bring the oceans with you. At first, only brackish water close to the ocean could be colonized, then farther and farther away as adaptations like roots, vascular systems, and waxy coatings in plants enabled even those organisms that can’t move to gather, store, and hold on to their precious water supply. Deserts represent the absolute pinnacle of this achievement of evolution.

The true signature of life on earth is its perpetual battle against entropy, or disorder. When James Lovelock was looking for ways to detect life on other planets, he wondered at how an alien might detect life on ours – his answer was disequilibrium. Entropy would dictate that all disequilibrium naturally goes toward equilibrium states – all ordered things dissipate into randomness. And yet on earth we find a huge amount of disequilibrium, even in the constitution of our atmosphere; oxygen and methane don’t last long together, but in Earth’s atmosphere they’re both perpetually present due to living processes. Dump water into the sand and it will slowly dissipate, spreading out and evaporating. All that water together in such a dry place is a disequilibrium that would naturally go towards randomness. And yet look at all those plants and animals living in such places! I see thousands of ants scurry across the sand – little tiny packets full of water! Trees and cacti, bushes and scrub have all evolved ways to thrive here, gathering the trifle of water that falls so seldom and turning themselves into little oceans protected from the agents of entropy - heat and the dry, sucking wind. One animal, the kangaroo rat of the US southwest, has even evolved the ability to make its own water from the dry food it eats. You may remember from high school biology that the products of animal respiration are water and carbon dioxide; well this rat eats dry food and can use that metabolic water to hydrate.

All of the solutions that these animals have developed over hundreds of millions of years are wonderfully elegant, all very well adapted to the local conditions, and all tried and true. They require no mass reconstruction of the landscape, diversion of massive amounts of water, or infusions of vast amounts of energy (except of course, for sunlight). On all these fronts the most recent inhabitants of the dry lands could use a little work.

Where I will live - The Big Picture

2009-09-02T00:41:00.002-04:00

I will be spending my next two years in Israel. Why, you might ask, would I choose to fly halfway across the world, leaving family and friends behind, to pursue something that I could very well pursue right here in Canada? Aren’t there Universities here? Don’t they have ecology and environmental science programs? Don’t we have environmental problems to deal with in our own backyard? Yes, on all accounts.

But there’s just something about Israel.

When I was in the Israeli Consulate today getting my student visa stamped, there were a couple of maps that showed the shape of Israel super-imposed onto Canada. The entire nation barely covers the distance from Windsor to Orillia, and that’s its length! At its narrowest point, Israel is probably as wide as the traffic congestion bubble on the 401 created by Toronto. And yet, there it stands, the most vibrant, successful, complex, dysfunctional, beautiful, diverse, and controversial nation on earth, illogically constructed on a little sliver of land with little water, few natural resources, and hostile neighbors. I mean, the place would seem like a desert mirage if it wasn’t real. And yet it is just this illogical nature of Israel that draws me to it as a crucible of how the world might deal with the most important issues facing humanity at the moment.
Here is how Israel’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs describes Israel’s water situation:

“Israel currently faces the most serious water crisis in its history. Several
years of insufficient rainfall and increased demands due to population growth
and expanding industry have led to a situation where drastic measures to reduce
water consumption are necessary.
“Israel has also ceded millions of cubic litres annually as a part of the peace agreements with Jordan and it is no secret that there is just not enough water in the long run, nor will there be unless other sources such as desalination operated by cheap, sustainable energy become available. For this reason, large budgets are devoted to the development of solar energy for desalination and recently an agreement was reached with the World Bank to fund an experimental power plant that derives its energy from ocean waves.
“In the private sector less attention is paid to water conservation and it is only when the level of the Sea of Galilee, Israel's largest surface water source, begins to drop below the danger point, and when people see this on their television sets, that anyone seems to be concerned. But vast efforts are underway to find agricultural and industrial uses for water that is too saline to be potable and many other, smaller projects are devoted to this.”

The water level of the sea of Galilee is dropping rapidly, the mighty Jordan River that originates there is often but a trickle, and thus the Dead Sea, which receives the river’s waters, is rapidly drying up. Not only that, but water is a very key political issue, as alluded to in the MFA’s statement. Jeff Halper, an Israeli peacenik and nominee for the Nobel Peace Prize often points out that the borders that Israel intends to draw for a final two-state solution have a lot to do with water infrastructure. So here we have a basic problem – Israel is currently drawing water at unsustainable rates, and that’s whilst serving the Palestinians living in the Occupied Territories some major environmental injustice (many Palestinians have seriously rationed access to water while neighboring Israeli settlers water their lawns and swim in their pools). Having largely integrated the West Bank into its own infrastructure due to the network of settlements erected since 1967, the feat of managing the region’s water resources in a cooperative and just manner is a staggering political, technological, and environmental challenge.
But it must be done, and done soon. If it can be done in Israel, it can be done anywhere. And if it can be done anywhere, it can be done in Israel.

Maestro, if you please...

2009-09-02T00:41:00.000-04:00

Yesterday morning I got an e-mail from Ben Gurion University giving me full acceptance into their masters program. By this time in 2011 I will have an MSc. in Desert Studies, with a specialization in Environmental Studies! This means that the Blog is on!

Welcome family, friends, and interested onlookers to Milk and Honey, where I will be documenting my experience at the Arava Institute for Environmental Studies and Ben Gurion University, both located in the Negev Desert in the south of Israel. While the focus of my masters research will be fairly specific and the nitty gritty details of interest to only a few, the scope of this particular masters program encompasses far more than just soil biology and its relationship to the physiological ecology of the Argan tree (pictured in the blog title). Here is a quote from the Arava Institute’s website:

Here, the idea that nature knows no political borders is more than a belief. It is a fact, a curriculum, and a way of life.

The explicit mission of the Institute is to bring people together from all over the region and all over the world, people who all have a stake in the natural resources that are endangered by environmental degradation and climate destabilization. There are two paths – one in which increasingly scarce resources become a source of conflict, and one in which they become a source of cooperation. There is hope: already, there are people who have graduated from the Institute working in the environment ministries of Israel, the Palestinian Authority, and Jordan. It may not seem that monumental in the face of such a monumental conflict, but it’s a start.

I get on a plane to Tel Aviv on the 23rd of September, and until then I will try to periodically fill you in on some more details – where I’ll be living, what I’ll be doing, and why I’ll be doing it. Then once I get there the fun will really begin!